53 Things I Learned in My Career as a Supervillain
by purplegirl761
Summary: Even the most brilliant of mad scientists needs to be able to learn from his mistakes. Drakken-narrated vignettes revolving around the episodes he appears in. Very mild T.
1. Tick-Tick-Tick

**~Okay, so. . . this is what I've been up to lately, if anyone's missed me. ;) It stared out as a chapter for Assorted Ficlets, and then grew so massive I had to post it as a separate story. I will a post a (very short) chapter every day or two. Still massive love for you guys! :)~  
**

_1\. Hide all self-destruct buttons in places where you cannot accidentally activate them with a bang of your head._

Sirens blare in harmony with squealing tires as the police cars round the corner, nearly skidding up onto the curb as they rock themselves to a stop beneath the metallic replica of a taco shell. From his dangling position on its side, Dr. Drakken's already-tremulous hold falters more, and he gazes down at the police with decidedly mixed emotions.

On the one hand, those sirens and those hurried tires are for _him_. Dr. Drakken, the great and glorious future ruler of Earth, is being acknowledged as a true threat, for perhaps the first time in his villainous career!

On the other hand, Drakken doesn't want to be arrested - who would? - and it'll be his first arrest since Shego came to work for him. There hasn't been an alarm system built yet that Shego can't disable, nor a police officer born she couldn't trounce into the earth. Even now, she's lost only because Kim Possible is what they refer to in the evil-genius business as a cheater-cheater-pumpkin-eater. Threw Shego right through the door with deliberate trajectory into the path of that man with the buzzed-off hair. Knocked them both out, with no regard for the safety of that innocent civilian.

The same child stands beneath the taco tower now, wearing a self-important smile and a green tank top that wouldn't have flown with the dress code back when _Drakken_ was in high school. Remarkably unfazed, even though he just told her she wasn't "all that." Aren't those words to fatally wound the soul of a vapid adolescent girl? Who does she think she is, anyway?

And for that matter, who _is_ she? Why does she care? She's not a policeman - policewoman - police_girl_ if there is such a thing, not a first responder of any type. She's a kid, barging in on matters she doesn't understand and putting herself on the map of some very bad people.

But on the _both_ hands - Drakken grimaces, gripping harder, though he can't stop his wrists from quavering - he can't very well hang from this metal taco for the rest of his life. Although, he sort of has to, because there won't _be_ a rest-of-his-life if he lets go at this point. At least he doesn't think so. He hasn't experimented with this exact altitude. Maybe he could throw some kind of contraption and see what shape it's in when it hits. . .

No, that _still_ wouldn't work because it would be a thing, not a person. And since Drakken does not currently have any world leaders to drop (because if he's going overthrow them, why not just go ahead and _throw them over_?), he will refrain.

Although hurling Kim Possible over the side is looking more and more appealing.

A fire truck wedges between the police cars. A ladder stretches up and up and up, and Drakken finds himself looking into the bewhiskered face of a firefighter - a face that visibly recoils as soon as it registers Drakken's.

Oh, yes. This will also be his first arrest since his - _eh-heh_ \- little skin mutation.

By the time Drakken realizes that this is exactly the kind of reaction he should be savoring, the guy has already grabbed him and is inching him down the ladder. It's too late. _Too late, too late!_ rattles through the frozen mass of intelligence inside his head.

Drakken does thrash about in the fireman's arms. It earns him a knee in the pelvis and a harsh whisper of, "Look, dude. You don't want me to drop you."

That's true.

And so Drakken waits until the fireman has his feet on the ground before coiling up every ounce of strength in his body and ramming it into the man. The fireman brushes aside Drakken's one-hundred-and-fifty-five pounds as if they are nothing more than a few flies and cranks Drakken's hands behind his back. The already-tender tendons in his wrists beg for mercy.

_Tender tendons._ Drakken almost chuckles, though the sound turns to mush in his nose. _That's alliteration on a grand scale._

Drakken is hoisted into the back of the paddy wagon. Shego waits for him there - she's awake now, thank goodness. Drakken had never seen her blacked out before - never even seen her _asleep_ before - and it was frightening. She doesn't sneer when she's unconscious, and it makes her look so very, very young. Switches her from someone you could trust to defend _you_ into someone your gut ached to defend.

As the door clangs shut behind them, Drakken blinks at Shego. "You've never failed me before," he muses.

Shego gives him a look meant to parboil him, and Drakken isn't entirely sure why. That statement was ninety-five percent compliment.

The ride to the station is made long by her glare and by the fact that Drakken's hands are forced to curl backward from his already-achy lower back. He feels cold and deeply shadowed, even though the sun is still several hours from setting. Once they are inside, the police split the two of them up, and Drakken can't suppress a cry of "Shego!" as his sidekick, his sole ally, is handed off to a female officer who appears no softer than her male counterparts. The women have their own prison, Drakken knows, which is for the best considering the absolute lack of privacy, but. . .

"Why do you have to split us up _now_?" Drakken grumbles into the police officer's brass badge.

The policeman doesn't pause for a nanosecond. "Keep walking."

"You can check my rap sheet!" Drakken squawks. "I'm not _that_ kind of criminal!"

Still no pause until they reach a cell with peeling Shego-colored paint on its walls. The policeman unlocks the door and heaves Drakken into the cell in much the same manner as he's seen garbage collectors handle their loads. Almost as an afterthought, he clicks the cuffs off Drakken's wrists.

There's no time to make a dive for the door or soak up the relief that cools his arms before it's shut again, with the guard on the right side of it.

Drakken sinks down onto a cot the consistency of mushroom stew and tries not to think about everything he's lost. For example, he shouldn't think about the hovercraft, blasted apart by his nanotick, that he'll need to fix once he gets out. Or about the gravitomic ray that surely went with it. Or about the last bit of respect that he saw flee Shego's eyes as the fire hydrant soaked her bangs to her forehead.

The grungy yellow light coming from the low bulb overhead makes Drakken's stomach pound, but to look away from it is to move closer to the bars and get an unbearable, striped view of freedom. Everything's bubbling and foaming inside him like a maddening carbonation. The holding-back is unpleasant - _worse_ than unpleasant - but the police are already eying him as if he's a disease, and he doesn't need to add froth to the blue, scarred imperfection.

_Don't touch anything._ Shego's words play on a loop in his brain. _You - don't touch_ any_thing!_

Drakken swallows and crimps his fists. He's forgotten how self-doubt wallops you between the eyes when you are alone in a holding cell. Ever since he came up the idea for his nano-tick-bot-explosive, it has only been coming in fits and starts that could be fought off.

All right, so he goofed by putting the detonator directly in the center of the dashboard, a spot where he often flings his face in disappointment. It should have been somewhere else - only where else _could_ it go? Where _doesn't_ he fling his face when victory is yanked away from him?

It had to have been able to detonate from a distance, Drakken decides as he edges away from the sunlight coming between the bars. Was more effective that way.

And, okay, so he didn't especially want to _be_ right there watching a world leader's head get blown to bits. So sue him!

_Maybe I could have put it somewhere high above my head,_ Drakken thinks. _Back in my lair._

But then he'd have to use his belt-buckle jet-pack to get to it. Those would be useless if someone already has him in an armlock, and flight is one of the few powers Shego doesn't have.

Perhaps if all the henchmen stacked up on top of each other -

_No! I can't rely on the henchmen!_

Drakken tries not to shudder as he glances down at his faux-leather boots. In no time at all, they'll be replaced by hateful squeaky prison sneakers that can take him back in time, drag him back to a decade when his ten-year-old self was pinned between a jungle gym and a mob of boys twice his size.

_You - don't touch_ anything! _Don't touch anything!_ What _did we agree on?_ Shego keeps playing on a mental eight-track tape. . . or whatever they use these days. Drakken scrapes his fingernails backward through his hair and, for the first and probably last time in his life, sympathizes with Kim Possible.

This must be how it feels to have a bomb strapped to your head.


	2. Bueno Nacho

_2\. Inspect the foundational integrity of each lair_ before _you move in. Especially if you're bringing laser drills._

It was a great plan. A wonderful plan. It would go down in history as the world's most creative power coup.

Wisconsin was to be covered in magma, and Dr. Drakken would rise majestically from the ashes and reign supreme. It was _allegorical_.

Now, _that_'s ruined, too. No one has _ever_ risen from a cubic acre of Swiss cheese.

_Who makes a building out of cheese, anyway?_

Drakken growls and wriggles his shoulders, trying to pry himself free, away from the tourists who laugh and snap pictures as though he is just another attraction. His arms are Superglued to his sides, only with with cheese rather than Superglue, and he can't even vouch for his feet's existence anymore.

The silence from Shego rubs at his nerve endings like the laugh tracks on sitcoms. Her entire upper body has been swallowed by the cheese, kitty-corner from his, so that his head is level with her lower half. Any uncouth young man who happens by could get far too good a look at her legs - or worse. Come to think of it, how does Drakken know that blond kid in the clip-tie isn't doing just that? He always seemed rather infatuated with Drakken's sidekick. . .

But the kid is right in Drakken's line of sight, and his eyes are nowhere near Shego. "I call it 'bad guy _con queso_,'" he says proudly, and the tourists crack up even more.

_Oh. "With cheese." I get it. You're so funny._

But Drakken's being squeezed too tightly together for any words to make their way out. He lies there among the smell of pure Wisconsin Swiss, which makes him crave pastrami on rye in addition to workable limbs. He's swallowed up, overwhelmed, and Dr. Drakken _hates_ being overwhelmed.

At one point, he screws his mouth to the side and takes a huge bite of cheese, just to show that he is Man, and Man consumes Cheese, not the other way around. It tastes like a mothball, though, and Drakken realizes that everything he had stored in that building is now hardened into the cheese - everything from his henchmen's Electroconvulsive Sticks to his load of lab coats to be thrown in the wash. The mouthful is expelled at the thought, which the tourists just love.

Drakken is almost grateful when the police show up with hammer and chisel. Almost. Not quite. Instead of remaking Wisconsin in _his_ image, he has to be pried out of someone else's warped mold. Several chisels later, and Drakken falls gasping onto the ground. He should get up and run, but the muscles in his legs, which he'd been sure were shredded, are coming back to life one tingling layer of static-shock at a time. An officer has his foot in the middle of Drakken's back before he even regains sensation in his big toe.

To their credit, the police continue to chip away from the left-side-right. If they chipped from the outside-in, the only way to steady Shego would be to grab her around the waist. And the great and terrible Dr. Drakken does not sit back and allow such things, even when he feels more like a shredded salad than anything else.

As soon as Shego is freed from the rind, though, she jerks away from the officers and shoots daggers at them with her eyes. No, forget daggers. Those eyes could have drilled through the earth and brought the magma to the surface all on their own.

Once the two of them, plus a horde of henchmen, are chipped out, the paddy wagon is waiting there for them. Drakken climbs in, still shaking hardened cheese from his hair, and sinks onto a padded seat.

Shego sits across from him, legs folded, gaze slanting his way. "A cheese-covered building, huh?" she says.

Drakken wants to shove her head back into the cheese, muffle the sass some. "You thought it was, too, Shego," he snaps back.

"Yeah? And was it _my_ job to make sure it wasn't?"

Drakken squirms. The seat isn't padded _enough_. "Why not? You'd be great at it! Why shouldn't it be your job?!"

"Hmm. Because the person who can claim most of the credit and the person who does most of the work should be the same person?" Shego's voice lilts at the end of that sentence, but it's not an authentic question. Just more sass.

"NGGGHHH!"

That seems to be the only response Shego needs, because she falls silent for the rest of the ride. Drakken hunches as far away from her accusing angles as he can and silently broils as if there's magma in _him_.

It wasn't even the world this time. It was just one state. One measly little _state_. There are forty-nine others, and that's without even counting the District of Columbia!

Wait - or are you supposed to count the District of Columbia? Drakken never quite figured that one out.


	3. Crush

**~Thanks for the reviews, guys! Sorry I've been so long getting back to some of you. Last week was crazy busy; I hope to get caught up soon. **

**To guest reviewer bcbdrums: If you include cameos and count _Sitch in Time _and _So the Drama _as three episodes each, yeah, he's in fifty-three. So this will eventually have fifty-three chapters. With plenty of Shego snark, too. ;)~  
**

_3\. When hijacking someone else's technology, reset the password!_

"Kim Possible!" Drakken cries. He lets go with one fist to shake it in her general simpering direction. "You think you're all that, but you're not!"

"Drakken!" Shego barks from above him. "Get a grip and _keep_ it this time!"

Drakken curls his left set of fingers around Shego's leg pouch, though he hopes the scandalized burn in their tips is something she can feel, too. "You don't _understand_, Shego," he says. "Being shown up by Kim Possible is -"

"Preferable. To. Dying." Shego shifts her arms, the arms she has wrapped around a beam near the ceiling, and the floor sways feverishly below the two of them. "Stop moving."

Drakken glances down at the shifting floor, recognizing just how far off the ground they are, and fear rolls over him in heat waves. Maybe it's the fear he should have felt thirty seconds earlier when he let go with his left hand - his stronger hand, at that - and nearly went tumbling to the ground.

"Okay, look," Shego says. Her sigh pushes against his head. "I'm gonna swing myself up onto the beam, okay?"

"I'll fall!" Drakken protests. His baritone boom deserts him for the first time all week.

"No, no. I'll grab you." Shego peers down at him. "I promise I won't let you fall."

Drakken slowly begins to nod. He's never heard Shego promise anyone anything before, and he knows what a good liar she is. Yet her eyes are steady and intent on him. This is Shego's _I-hate-to-lose_ expression.

And she is Shego, who has always, always protected him.

Shego inches one leg so that it hangs parallel to the beam and then swings them both over. In keeping with Drakken's prediction, his grasp fails him and he slips. Before the screaming panic can open up inside him, though, Shego's hand snatches his wrist as she balances. She must be part bird, Drakken decides, gaping, as she hoists him onto the beam with her and then settles back into herself without even a strand of hair out of place.

The beam is skinny, so narrow that Shego has to stand with her feet side-by-side to stay on it. Drakken scrunches himself up tightly as well, because he is _much_ more substantial than Shego, even if he doesn't look or feel like it right now.

"You should've changed the password," Shego says.

"Now is _not_ the time to gripe at me for that," Drakken hurls back at her. "Whatever password Nakasumi used would still be in Japanese and therefore obscure, right?"

"Not to someone who plays Nakasumi games all the stinkin' time," Shego says. "_Kon'nichiwa_?"

"Ye-es?" Drakken hears himself hedge.

"It means 'hello.' It's like making your bank-account password 1-2-3-4-5."

Phew. He's safe then. His is 5-4-3-2-1 - the old evil-genius countdown.

"Oh." Drakken twists his lips, and he knows a bridge of pink has begun to connect his cheeks. "Well, it doesn't help us now, does it?" he adds with a great deal more ferocity. "The police will be here any second! If I can sneak back into that robot -"

"Forget it, Doc." Shego rolls her eyes. "The robot's toast, and you can't 'sneak' anywhere. Here's what we're gonna do, okay? When the police come, let them grab you."

Drakken's jaw drops. He's dizzy. "_What_?"

"Keep it _down_." Shego's still whispering, hot and fast. "You distract the police with your general obnoxiousness, I slip away, I come back and bust you out as soon as the coast is clear, and we're back in business. Got it?"

"Well, when you put it _that_ way, it makes sense." Admitting it is like peeling off a scab, and Drakken can't help flinching. Not for the first time today.

The first time today was when Shego took over his gigantic user-friendly evil robot. Her first executive decision was to release its hold on the kid - with the pants problem - whatever his name is. He fell past Drakken, screaming himself hoarse as he plummeted toward that darn shifting floor.

Drakken reached out an arm for him - reflexively, as if someone hammered his elbow.

It didn't matter. Kim Possible caught him the way she always did. And, luckily, Shego hadn't seen, or there'd be no end to the taunting.

_So I tried to catch the kid,_ Drakken scoffs to himself. So what? The kid is no threat on his own. Couldn't even guess the plan. Was still convinced Drakken was trying to steal Christmas, which is a stupid theory because Christmas is the finest holiday ever created, and why would Drakken want to be rid of it?

Father's Day is a whole different story. . .

A villain's first act of bloodshed must be a lot like a teenager's first kiss, Drakken figures as he stares at the door, waiting. You don't want to just rush out and accomplish it with just anyone. You want to save it for someone _important_.

Any second now, that door will burst open and a swarm of armed people will rush in. They will wear cobalt blue like Drakken, so that he feels betrayed in some odd way. The room washes before his eyes again, and Drakken frowns to himself.

Funny - heights have never affected him this way before.


	4. Mind Games

**~Been a little under the weather this weekend. With try to get caught up later this week. No, I haven't forgotten you guys - how could I? ;) ****Thanks for the reviews!~  
**

_4\. If you have to leave your body in someone else's care for awhile, make sure you give it knockout drops! Or chain it up like Houdini, whatever! Just make sure you don't lose track of your body!_

Private Dobbs' body does have one advantage aside from the government-approved retinas, Drakken decides as he scampers away from the time-share lair, lungs nearly hissing steam. Longer legs.

Drakken may be a chemistry major in spirit, but he has a close relationship with the principles of physics as well. Longer legs equals longer strides. Longer strides equals faster running. Faster running equals farther away from the lair before it -

**Kaboom!**

Hopefully no one hears Drakken's yip over the roar of the explosion. Thrown forward more by his own momentum than by the blast, Drakken collides with the ground, lower mandible first. He brings his hands up and locks them, trembling, over his head. _His_ hands, with their nails bitten down to stubs underneath their favorite gloves, and _his_ head, with its hair suspended away from his brow. Ahh, yes, it is good to be back in his own body.

Drakken pushes himself to all fours and refuses to glance backward. He can't bear to see the Neutronilizer reduced to scrap metal. The lair he couldn't care less about - it was registered to Professor Dementor, and that man is nothing more than an easy-living snob. If it takes lairs blowing up to knock Dementor and his bank account down a few pegs, Drakken is all too happy to oblige.

Still, if just _one_ of the world leaders responded to Drakken's demands, he'd still have his sleeve up the aces (or however the saying goes). If only _one_ country, even a tiny little country like Monaco, had said yes, he would be able to pack up his few things, fly over there, and assume ruler. . .ship . . . hood immediately. He even tapped his own phone line so that their concession would be recorded for posterity. It was an idea he thought up earlier in the day, and it was so mind-bogglingly brilliant it melted his words into electric little squeaks.

Those squeaks are still happening, their polarity reversed, as Drakken remains parallel to the ground. _If_ he had even one country under his belt, which _would_ have happened if he hadn't lost his own body. No one would take Private Dobbs' body seriously, and why should Drakken blame them for that? It was ridiculously tall and even more absurdly thin, so that Drakken felt tugged and tightened inside it, like a guitar string. Its fair-to-middling skin and pair of round, geeky glasses sent a shiver wriggling through Drakken. It was like looking at some future version of Drew Lipsky, if he'd never become Dr. Drakken when he grew up. Drakken had spent most of his excursion into Dobbs' body feeling the flop of bangs that were not his; breathing excessively through wide, flaring nostrils that also weren't his; and speaking in displaced snarls, almost certain his enormous voice would blow Dobbs' body flat against the wall.

The puppet, though - he's surprised that didn't work.

Drakken slowly edges his way to his feet. Yes, they _are_ his feet - his small, eager feet. And there is his scar, scratchy and tough, shieldlike against his soft flesh. Now he can thaw out in his _real_ body, shorter than Dobbs' and with broader bones, even if they don't have quite as much meat on them as Drakken would like. He shakes his wider shoulders in pride.

All right, so some of that is due to the padding in his lab coat. At least they no longer feel like they're clamped in twin vises.

No thanks to Kim Possible and her little do-gooder team, who had the nerve to claim they'd "rescued" Private Dobbs. Why, they actually put reclaiming the Neutronilizer above returning the poor man to his own body!

Drakken can almost feel Jack Hench's schmoozing elbow driving into his ribs, hear him hissing, _You should have taken better security measures._ He knows he should have, probably would have - except - except -

Except he never anticipated anyone in his body could win a fight against Shego, much less against Shego _and_ all the henchmen. It simply wasn't feasible. Dobbs was military, though Drakken doesn't know if that's what made the difference. To what extent did that stay in his body and to what extent did it transfer with his brain? Drakken had done enough research on the theoretical bio-exchange to build his machine and make sure it didn't turn people inside-out, but he didn't know every in and out of swapping brains.

Anyway, whose fault is it that Dobbs escaped in the first place?

_Oh, right. . ._

The henchmen cower the second Drakken looks at them, although they still hold their stunner-sticks. An ember wafts down onto Shego's black glove before Drakken can turn his sternness on her. "Crud!" she barks and in one panther-fast move rips the glove off and shakes it out.

This confuses Drakken for a moment. Her gloves must be flame-retardant or else her plasma would have burned them up seven times over by now. Then again, if the fabric somehow lets the plasma out without burning the gloves, it would probably let the ember _in_ without burning the gloves, either.

And isn't he supposed to be angry at her, anyway?

Drakken turns around and scowls his eyebrow down at Shego. It's a pretty impressive scowl, too - the kind that crushes his skin against his facial bones rather than elongating and highlighting the roundness.

And it lasts until he spots the magenta mark spilled across Shego's wrist like red wine.

Except - no, it's not a spill. It marches up from her close-fitting sleeve in four rod shapes, with a reddened mass beneath them and then a fifth, stubby mark nearly at a ninety-degree angle from the first rod.

It's a handprint. A bruise.

Drakken narrows his eyes and has no trouble commanding them to harden. "Shego? What is this?"

Shego makes a very un-Shego sound, sort of a giggle, constructed from sugar crystals. It leaves a terrible aftertaste in the air. "This? Nothing."

"Don't tell me it's _nothing_, Shego!" Drakken barks. He takes a step closer. "Who grabbed you? Who hurt you?"

Shego pulls in the biggest breath Drakken has ever heard her take. "Okay. Uh, actually, Doc - _you_ did."

Drakken stops halfway through his next step, his leg clomping nervously against the ground. "_I_ did?" That can't be true!

But now it's coming back to him. Back at the time-share lair. He was yelling because his body had disappeared. Shego tried to distract him by telling him this body was cute and reached up to touch his face. That was the very last thing any supervillain ever wanted to be, "cute," and no matter which body Drakken's residing in, he cannot handle randomized touch.

He'd gotten mad. Grabbed her hand. Squeezed it.

Brought her blood out under the skin.

"Shego, no. Ohhh, I - I - " There is a word for what you are when you have accidentally hurt your friends, but darned if Drakken can remember what it is right now. He's shaking much too hard. "I - I - I - I didn't mean to!"

"Of course you didn't," Shego says. There's no sarcasm in her eyes as she snaps the glove back into place, hiding the bruise he left on her. "Army Man's got a way stronger grip than you do." She tosses her head. "And, I mean, it's not like it's ever gonna happen again, right?"

"No." Drakken shakes his ponytail. "Not with my brain-switching machine destroyed." He glances at her again - he is still taller than her, but not by much, and it's as if he is shrinking in exponents that increase the longer she looks back at him. "Shego, I really never would have done that on purpose - "

Shego raises one hand, fingers clamped together, her signal for his lips to do the same. "Bruises heal, okay? Don't give yourself a stroke or anything."

Drakken lowers his head and studies his hands. His again, with their short, slim fingers. Hands made for delicate scientific procedures, not wringing the life out of someone.

It _is_ fantastic to be back in his body, which Private Dobbs gave up so willingly and ungratefully, as if Drakken lent him a hideous sweater to wear to school one day.

_"It's ugly! And it itches something fierce!"_

As Drakken watches his hand, it curls into a fist. If there were some kind of machine that would lift Shego's bruise off her wrist and smash it down hard onto Dobbs', he would stop and invent right here.


	5. Attack of the Killer Bebes

_5\. Even if you have Ferocious Robotic Women Warriors of Death, you need Shego! They can't break Shego._

Drakken sinks onto a stiff cot in the Middleton County Jail and punches a pillow that feels like it's filled with cornstarch. His shoulders sting from where the ceiling quite rudely stopped his ascent, but it doesn't matter. Nothing can hurt as badly as the burn that traverses his whole body with every heartbeat.

James's voice echoes in his mind: _Which, since you never graduated, you're not really entitled to._

It burns, it _burns_.

The Bebes' voices follow: _If we are perfect, why do we obey one who is_ not _perfect?_

Drakken gulps at that replay. He remembers staring up at them - why did he make them bigger than him, why? - and realizing that in that moment everyone in the room with him was an enemy. The Bebes hadn't cracked into their spider-forms yet, but he knew that predatory stalk. They were coming to finish him.

Which, really, it makes no sense when you think about it. Any scientist worth their salt could tell you that an AI cannot conceivably be smarter than the person who created her. . . _it_, he corrects himself. Knowledge tends to get lost, not to increase, during those types of transfers.

That makes Bob Chen wrong when the memory of his voice adds, _It's college all over again. That man cannot build a robot._

Drakken's prepared speech had fallen apart. He got out the line about being blue on the inside - which he thought was a marvelous use of figurative language - and then the tears came. Not planned. Not wanted.

Not affecting in the slightest to the three men who laughed just as heartily now as they had then.

Now the sound effects of the Bebes' fight with Kim Possible are playing so loudly in his head Drakken could swear they are happening right outside his cell. He rests his head on the wall beside the cot and folds his fingers around the bricks as an anchor. The second he crumbles, a guard will walk in to witness it. Lipsky's First Law of Prison Dynamics.

There's a scream. Drakken tilts his head to one side and whacks it to make sure, but, no, no mistaking it. It was real.

The scream falls away, and someone more in control speaks. It is not a memory, and with any luck it is also not a mirage, because it says, "Dr. D?"

Even with its eyes in slits of evergreen, Shego's face is the friendliest one he's seen all day. Around her, guards are heaped into groaning piles, arms flopped beside them. Dangling between her fingers is the shiny gold key ring that will save him.

"Shego!" Drakken flies to the bars and wraps his hands around them even as Shego clicks the biggest key into the lock. "What are you doing here?"

"What do you think I'm doing here, getting my nails done?" Shego shoves open the cell door and smacks it against the opposite wall. A guard twitches behind her, and Shego lets fly with a plasma ray that bounces off his blue cap and renders him unconscious again. "Come on, move it!"

She grabs his arm and hauls him from the cell. In the next five seconds, they are in the corridor, Drakken pressed against the wall, willing himself flat and silent like Shego has effortlessly become, and then they are out the back door, Drakken walking on the tips of his toes. Actually, he's not sure why he's being so careful - Kim Possible is likely out at her favorite restaurant, the one with the taco tower, celebrating yet another victory over Dr. Drakken the Weak and Measly.

In any case, Kim Possible does not appear. Drakken throws himself into the waiting hovercraft, and Shego straps herself in beside him and starts punching buttons. Only once the jailhouse is a grayish-yellow pinprick beneath him does Drakken feel safe enough to go slack against his seat back. The fight he'd been shaking between his teeth all day has gone, deserted him, or maybe its head was smashed with the Bebes'.

As if reading his mind, Shego throws a sideways glance his way. "Should I even _ask_ what happened to your foolproof robots?" she says.

Drakken's chest pulses. He's surprised it isn't radiating light like a signal flare. "They turned on me," he says. "They decided they were perfect and I wasn't, so they tried to dethrone me."

Shego snorts. "You are like a walking sci-fi cliche."

The burn intensifies, yet Drakken refuses to double over, grant it the acquiescence it wants. He begins immediate CPR on his ego, clutching and puffing, over and over, until it grows as full and solid as a mad scientist's ego should. With it locked in place, the expanse of his chest and the cocky waggle to his head come as naturally as the soreness in his muscles. "I make it look _good_," he brags.

Shego's eyelids fall in disgust. That insult, at least, is normal. Normal is nice. Normal is nice after abnormal robots try to slice you open. . . or whatever they were planning to do to him.

_If we are perfect_ \- the Bebes run their infrared motion-detector gazes over him - _why do we obey one who is_ not _perfect? Conclusion: Drakken is unfit for command._

Well, what did they know, anyway? Look at how Kim Possible defeated them with minimal sweat left on her forehead when she was done. Shego is tougher and smarter and prettier than the three of them _multiplied_ together. They are nothing more than wire and circuits, metallic limbs, and speech syntax. Couldn't they even see the logical paradox they created by declaring themselves perfect and Drakken imperfect in the same sentence? They can't be perfect if he isn't, and Drakken knows he's not.

Very close. But not quite.


	6. October 31st

_6\. Do not trust Kim Possible's word on anything. Even if she is speaking to people she trusts, she could just as well be lying!_

Drakken's cuffed hands dangle between his knees as he hunches in front of the door. Inside is the gray backdrop where they will take his mug shot picture. Why, he doesn't know - it's not like he has changed in appearance since his last arrest.

Why even print a mug shot of him? Why not just say, "Look out for the blue guy!" They'd save big on ink.

"Get on in there," the police officer says, giving Drakken's shoulder a gentle nudge toward the doorway. Officer _Hobble_, Kim Possible called him, although who can believe a word she says after tonight? He has some sort of an accent - almost like Killigan's, but somewhat off-key. Maybe it is simply a policeman accent, like Drakken has a supervillain accent.

The thought gives him an ingenious idea. Kim Possible isn't the only one who knows how to lie.

"Officer, this is a huge mistake!" Drakken cries. He adopts a look of wide-eyed terror that does not come easily to a villain of his caliber. "This is my Halloween costume! I think Dr. Drakken is the, err, coolest villain ever, and I went to a lot of trouble to dress up as him this year! Really, I'm just a regular. . . Joe? Er, Sam. My name is Sam."

A cleft forms in Officer Hobble's thick chin. Drakken's ever-clever brain whirs faster than a processor. Shego's gotten him out of jail before, so he ought to do the same for her. Killigan - well, he tried to renege on a deal that had never happened, so he can rot for all Drakken cares.

"And that girl with me - that's my best friend - Shannondella!" _That's a name, right?_ "We thought it would be extra-funny if she dressed up as Shego, get it, Dr. Drakken's sidekick, who's almost as amazing as he is? But then that scallywag Duff Killigan found us and mistook us for the _real_ Drakken and Shego, and things just sort of fell apart from there!"

Drakken receives a stony blink in reply.

"Don't you like my costume?" he finishes with a smile, the kind his mother calls "charming."

Officer Hobble taps the doorframe. "Are ya quite through?"

Oh drat. It isn't working.

"You _don't_ like my costume?" Drakken rasps. Might as well give it one more good try. Calling yourself "Sam" doesn't throw extra charges your way - _does it_?

Officer Hobble turns from the doorway and claps a hand on Drakken's shoulder. "Sir, I don't believe a word of that story, though I enjoyed hearin' it."

"Why don't you believe me?" Drakken says. He can feel a growl threatening to erupt in his throat, and he can't soothe it away with the cuffs clipped into place.

Instead of answering him directly, as rules of polite conversation dictate he should, Officer Hobble raises his voice and points it down the hall toward the female officer at the desk. "Officer Bell," he says, "do ya know why someone would want to go trick-or-treatin' dressed as Dr. Drakken?"

"As who?" the policewoman replies, her face twisting. Question marks in her eyes.

The righteous indignation that flares inside Drakken can't keep his legs from bowing and taking the rest of him with it. He shuffles, grumbling, into the room and stands before the gray backdrop and allows the camera to capture his sulky expression - no, it's _sullen_ \- much more villainous.

If Kim Possible had only been the good girl she's supposed to be, none of this ever would have happened. Not the armor bonding with her, not the hospital being taken hostage, not the ugly confrontation. She would have had nothing more than a bracelet on her wrist - certainly more comfortable than these stupid cuffs! - and Drakken would have robbed her of it, and everything would have been fine. No one would have to get hurt or go to jail or be grounded.

Drakken slouches further and glares at the camera. But she lied to her parents and she lied to her best friend, and she ruined his Halloween, and who knows what that armor could have done to Shego if she got any angrier?

And yet she'll continue to be labeled a hero. Well, a _heroine_.

Drakken hopes all of her Halloween candy comes back unwrapped and unfit to eat.


	7. Kimitation Nation

_7\. Cloning is not worth it._

Logistically, it should have worked.

Copies of Kim Possible. If a person cannot lose against a perfect equal, at least she cannot _win_, either. Now imagine those copies are _not_ perfect equals - imagine they also have the DNA of a king cobra and outnumber her seven to one. Any statistician would know where to place his bets on that fight.

Drakken kicks at a tacky paper-and-plastic cup on his way out the door. It rolls a few feet away into the parking lot, then has the gall to circle back around and spit soda into his path, the same kind of soda that reduced his beautiful copies to _duplicitous goopicus_ (which Drakken has just decided is the scientific name for melted quasi-clones).

He knew that was the fatal flaw in his plan: They weren't true clones. The recipe for a true clone involved the nucleus of one cell sucked out and planted in a female denuclearized cell, baked at womb temperature for nine months. But that was out of the question. Even if he sped up the aging process, Drakken would have been looking at months or even years before the clones were battle-ready, and he didn't have that kind of time!

Or that kind of money. He's still making down payments on the cobra.

Heck, where he would get a _womb_, for that matter? The only woman on his team has quit to go partying in Panama or some such place, and she would break his nose if he even suggested that plan, no matter how nicely he asked.

So, yes, Drakken knows where he went wrong. He just can't figure out where Kim Possible went _right_. How did she know those clones were weak copies, that they were carbonation-soluble? Surely she isn't a master chemist as well. Surely there must be _something_ on this earth that isn't a talent of hers.

Unfair, Drakken decides. That's the perfect word for it all. Unfair.

A car horn honks from the drive-in window, and Drakken whips around to glare at it. Red, four-door, convertible with the top down. Seated behind the steering wheel is the last person he wants to see, and he is so glad to see her.

"Shego!" Drakken cries. He grins so widely his cheeks almost tear apart, and he can feel tiny droplets of moisture in the corners of each eye. She is wearing sunglasses, black ones, that look like alien orbs on top of her coleslaw-colored face. They must be to hide her own joyous tears.

Drakken runs across the parking lot with his arms circled, pulling them behind his back at the last second, remembering Shego is not big on hugs. At all. "You came back!" he adds, rocking up on his toes. His pulse chambers through his veins.

Shego takes off the sunglasses.

When Drakken was a kid, there was a line of mysterious action figures, inconveniently packaged so that you never knew which one you were getting. The box you bought (or stole, Drakken supposes, though he hadn't been that devious yet) was blank, and you couldn't get any hints of what might be inside. That's what her eyes remind him of now.

They're also as dry as her voice when she says, "And what have we learned?"

Drakken feels himself slump over, like that new supervillain he saw getting carted away on the news last month - the one with the monkey parts. Quite odd. "No cloning," he ekes out.

It could have worked, it really could have, with a few technical tweaks. Still, the longer he stays there and looks at Shego, the more he realizes it wouldn't be even half as satisfying to take over the world on his own. Short-term, maybe, but not long. The thought of winning without Shego is like an old scab in his chest - it doesn't hurt, exactly, but it itches like crazy, burning almost, and he isn't supposed to scratch it, and it expands every single time he thinks about how he isn't supposed to scratch it.

Shego sighs. "Get in," she says, pointing her sunglasses toward the backseat.

The _back_seat? He's been relegated to the backseat? What happened to riding shotgun? Or riding laser, as that has been Drakken's weapon of choice lately -

Drakken glances at the passenger seat and sees him. And he isn't quite sure how he didn't notice him before.

"Him" is a man roughly two-point-eight times Drakken's size, with a higher concentration of melanin in his skin than Drakken and Shego put together. He has his arm flung across the back of Shego's headrest, and he nods and smiles at Drakken. His teeth are every bit as white and straight as Drakken's, and they are smaller, more economical, without the hint of an underbite. It is not a smile you return, Drakken knows immediately, not a smile you trust.

If Drakken still had even one of his lovely clones, he would sic them on the guy. But they're gone now - even his henchmen have fled the way cockroaches do when you flip on the light, and Drakken can't confront him alone. The guy's torso has more ridges and ruffles than a waffle fry.

Drakken glances covertly at the man again as he slides in the back and buckles his seat belt. Make that an entire _order_ of waffle fries.

And he feels like the soggy one left in the bottom of the bag.

"Who's _he_?" Drakken demands of Shego as the car leaves rubber treads in the Bueno Nacho parking lot. She doesn't answer. Drakken runs through a list of substitute names for the man in _his_ seat before settling on "Buff Biff."

Buff Biff inches his arm down from the headrest so that it lies ever-so-casually on Shego's shoulder. Shego turns around, but not to sever his hand. Instead, she looks at him like they are in a vacuum together, sealed off, no evil geniuses sitting in the back to bug them.

That isn't what has envy firing through all of his systems at will. Drakken does not covet looks like those - matter of fact, he'd be downright squeamish to receive one from a young thing like Shego. It is Buff Biff's place in the seat of importance, the place of honor that should be reserved for her employer, her _boss_.

So she met a guy while she was gone. Big deal. He just better not take too much of her attention away from work. If this last week has taught him anything (besides "no cloning"), it's that she's the only decent employee he has.

Drakken inhales shakily and glares with laser vision at the back of Buff Biff's head. _Watch yourself, young man. Just watch yourself._


	8. The Twin Factor

**~Hey, guys. Sorry for the delay. The last week has been crazy for me. I appreciate your patience. :) **

**Now. . . here's Drakken!~**

_8\. Mind control is a mixed bag. You need slaves strong enough to take out your enemies, but if it doesn't turn out to be, in fact, foolproof, and they turn on you - hoo boy._

Drakken is being chased by a panther, on two legs instead of four, her fur clumped into a mass that flows out behind her as she skids after him, undaunted by rocks or bushes or anything else. Clutching the plasma burn on his belt with one hand, he takes a step backward.

Bad move. It pins him between a wall of stone and Shego's out-thrust arms, and he isn't sure which one is harder as she strides toward him. Her black lips curl back, and Drakken half-expects to see fangs.

"Drakken!" His name is torn out of her like a jagged splinter.

He will never be able to fight her, Drakken knows. His only hope is to escape. He cuts his eyes deliberately to the left, but Shego, as cat-witted as ever, realizes his plan almost before Drakken does and lunges to the right, blocking his fake.

"Where do you think _you're_ going?" she says.

"Away," Drakken squeaks as the perspiration dribbles down his forehead, as if he has sweated away every ounce of testosterone in his body, though that's not even chemically possible.

Another step is all Shego needs. She digs her claws into the front of his lab coat and drops him. Drakken makes a valiant attempt to flail out from under her, but he is a knobby-kneed cheetah trying to ward off a panther, and he's on the ground in seconds, with her on top of him.

Shego unfolds one bladed finger and lets it hover daintily over Drakken's skin, appearing to deliberate with herself. Drakken can feel the cringe from his guts outward. It is the moment before the immunization, and you want to cry out for them to just stick the needle in already and be done with it.

Drakken cranks up a grin. "Shego, would you accept a complimentary gift package with my sincerest apol -"

Then the panther pounces, raking her claws across Drakken's cheek.

And - _oooooooh-ohh_, no, it's worse than the waiting.

Drakken howls out loud, not caring who hears him. Pain has ripped him open, hot and fearsome, freeing his blood to weep down his face onto the ground, and _ohhh_, it hurts, it hurts, it _hurts_.

"Aw, did you not like that, Drakken?" Shego says. She's breathing like an old crop-duster plane now, nostrils flaring. "Maybe this will be better."

Her knuckles collide with his eye, punching tears out. He needs to touch it, soothe it, somehow. Drakken smacks one arm into the dirt, over and over, but Shego has them pinned. He remembers her at the mercy of the Neuro-Compliance Chip, her vacant eyes and nice, cookie-offering smile, and realizes that this was raging under that the whole time.

"Do you think I'm one of your little toys?" Shego demands. "That you can just _experiment_ on?"

"No, no, no!" Drakken whips his head side to side. "I just wanted obedie -"

The fist crashes into his eye again before he can get even get out the last syllable. He could have been about to say "Oh, be discreet" for all _she_ knows.

"_Obedience_?" Shego says. Her voice is shrill, which should make it less frightening. "Are you serious?"

_Think, Drakken. Think!_ Ordinarily, thinking is something he is quite good at, but now he is bloody and blackened and charred, and the simplest ideas are all playing keep-away inside his mind.

"No, wrong word," Drakken finally says. "Loyalty? I wanted loyalty?"

"Right." Shego rolls her eyes. "You really thought you'd get my loyalty from treating me like a slave?"

Drakken frowns. "Well, as long as the Neuro-Compliance chip worked, yes, I did."

It is the correct answer, but it's the wrong one, too, because the punches start to rain down on him like ping-pong balls from the sky. Drakken sets his molars together until he can almost hear them screeching; it's the only way to hold back the full-out sobbing that each new crack of pain triggers. His vision is at fifty percent, a blur of green and black before him. When she yanks a handful of his hair-spikes, he bails, cries, "Shego, I'm sorry! I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm SORRY!"

Shego backs two paces away. She's not holding onto him anymore, but he can still feel her fury seeping out of her onto the burn on his belly. "You're sorry you did it, or you're just sorry that I'm beating you up?" she says.

Drakken sniffs and remembers how easy it was to put the Neuro-Compliance chip on her. He didn't even have to sneak up behind her - something that never works for anyone - just walked up with his hand in a friendly wave and clapped it to her forehead before she knew what was happening. "Both," he says.

It is clear from Shego's grimace that she will not be offering him more cookies anytime soon. Her hands flick at her hips. "People tend to get kinda protective of their free will, Drakken," she says.

Her words almost tremble. It goes through Drakken like a hot poker - or is that the burn on his stomach?

Drakken rolls so he can prop himself on his side. "It's not like I hurt you or anything," he says to both of them.

"Bet I could sue for psychological harm from listening to you talk about your cruddy childhood," Shego shoots back.

_But it's the only way anyone will listen._

Shego reaches out, takes Drakken's fingers between her own, and helps him to his feet. He almost gasps as one ankle refuses to rotate, cramped and plastic beneath him.

"Do not - _**ever** _\- do that again," Shego says directly into Drakken's face. Her claws form warning coils on his arms, and then they're gone.

Drakken nods meekly and limps to the river that his wonderful waterfall feeds. His reflection resembles a half-smoked cigarette, crumbly and weak. The hole seared into his belt reveals a circle of furious red in a sea of blue. The slashes on his face aren't as deep as the one that gave him his scar and have already stopped bleeding, but they are puffing up like his mother's apple turnovers. His left eye, too, is nearly lost amidst the swelling.

With a moan, Drakken collapses onto the nearest horizontal stone and attempts to turn his crackly ankle. Of course he didn't want to mind-control Shego to earn her loyalty. Who would _want_ to have to do that? She's been more rebellious than ever lately, sassing him, flat-out-ignoring his orders, sneaking out early on Fridays to meet guys - acting like the teenager she probably was last year.

"And just so know," Shego adds, her footsteps light around the rocks, "you do _not_ look good in this light." As if he didn't already know that.

Oooh, now that is just hitting below the singed belt! Drakken narrows one eye - the other is now beyond his control, like everyone and everything else he cares about in this stupid, hideous moment. "I never asked you to say that!" he snaps. "And I didn't believe it, either!"

Shego sniffs. She casts her hair over her shoulder and won't look at him, and Drakken feels like a card-holding member of The Royal Order Of Jerks.

It hurts.

Not as badly as the eye, but it hurts.


	9. Ron the Man

**~Sorry for the wait, guys! Was separated from my computer last week, but I'm back now! Hope you enjoy.~  
**

_9\. Take stock of ALL technologies in the immediate vicinity, even if they aren't the ones at the center of your scheme. Otherwise. . ._

Another day, another black eye.

Drakken smacks the wall so hard he sees floating zucchini and slides down to the hotel hallway's carpet. It's cushy and comfortable beneath him, and the irony of that throbs alongside his many bruises-in-the-making.

"What the stink, Dr. D?" someone says behind him.

Shego. Shego is back. Drakken doesn't know where she's been for the past ten minutes, but no matter. She will save him.

"Help!" Drakken cries. His compromised eyesight registers Kim Possible's smirk. He wants the Pan-Dimensional Vortex Inducer to combust in her hands and drag her into netherspace that she will never escape. Oh, how he hates to beg in front of her, and his pride shrills inside him like one of those annoying security alarms he always needs Shego to disable. "Shego, over here!"

Shego's arm slides behind his back and props him up on its wiry, invisible strength. She glances with curiosity at Kim Possible and her buffoonish friend but doesn't think to look a mere four inches off the floor, and why would she? "Whatever," she says. "Let's get you out of here."

The buffoon snickers as Shego leads Drakken past, and it's all Drakken can do not to stick his tongue out at the child. He doesn't want to move his mouth anyway. It feels weak, like he spilled solvent on it and it's disappearing.

"So," Shego asks once they have arrived at the hovercraft without further injury, "what exactly happened back there? Who beat you up? A cockroach?"

"Please," Drakken says tightly. "Professor Dementor would never stay at a place with a roach population. But it _was_ a vermin. The buffoon's vermin, to be exact."

A laugh jolts Shego forward almost across the console, yet there is no uncontrolled spray of spit. He always envied her that ability. "What, the mole rat's been working out?" she says.

At least she finds the idea _somewhat_ absurd, Drakken realizes, and his mood rises a few notches. "No," he says. "He stole another of those molecule-enhancing rings and used it to become incredibly strong and - err - caught me off guard, shall we say?"

Shego clutches the steering gears tighter and leans her head between them. Her laughter is hard and almost soundless, except for the slight wheeze at the ends.

"Oh, come now, Shego," Drakken says. He feels pink blotches on the back of his neck, right along the spot where he hit the wall. "It's not like I'm the first person in recorded history to be beaten up by a buff naked mole rat."

"Um, actually, I'm ninety-seven percent sure you are," Shego says.

Drakken shifts in his seat, pulling his seat belt away from the blotches. "Where are you getting your numbers?" he grouses at her.

"Same place you get yours," Shego replies, not a beat missed. "Out of thin air."

"That is not true!" Drakken roars. Now his dignity has a black eye, too. "I am a scientist! I am clinical! I am detached! I am - oh sweet baby gherkins, is my _lip_ bleeding?" he adds as something warm and salty drips into his mouth. He spits it as far as he can, swiping frantically at the torn area to get rid of more samples.

"Science at its finest," Shego comments, much too sarcastically for his taste. "Come on, let's get you home and you put an egg on your face or something." She glances sideways at him, as if that is supposed to mean something.

Drakken puckers his brow at her. "An egg would roll off, Shego! What I need is a bag of peas!"

A lazy curve claims Shego's mouth. She is making fun of him again - somehow - and he can't take it. He flips away from her, feeling the inflated skin beneath his black eye struggle upward. On the way, he gets a good long look at his own lanky arms and bony hands and a chest that, beneath the lab coat's reinforcement, feels quite a bit like a bag of peas itself.

Why, oh why, did the buffoon think of claiming a ring for himself, and the brilliant and cunning Dr. Drakken didn't? What made Drakken think the henchmen could be trusted to wield the rings' awesome power? It's almost - almost if he considered his own body a lost cause.

Well, that _can't_ be right.

Still turned away from Shego, Drakken lifts an elbow and flexes. Pain spears through him from every direction, and he drops the pose before he can perform an unbiased evaluation of himself.

Maybe that's for the best.


	10. Naked Genius

_10\. Reconsider your investment in death traps. A drop-away floor dazzles and intimidates, but it has no replay value. If someone manages to escape it, then you're sunk and they're not._

Drakken scowls as he loops another section of keep-out police tape - well, _supervillain_ tape - around the doorway of the Incredible Floorless Room. The evil realtor who sold him the place was contagiously radiant and beamed all through his description of the floor that fell away in cubes, opening up a piranha pit far below. Even when Drakken told him he gravitated more toward sharks, the man continued to beam and said, "Yes, but piranhas are a better investment in the long run. They do the job much quicker and with less mess!"

Well, both of those sounded like good things, so Drakken went ahead and bought. He'd been saving the drop-away floor for a special occasion - maybe his own personal housewarming party when Kim Possible showed up at the new lair for the first time. Oh, she showed up all right last night. Showed up and plucked the boy off the floor right before the last cube dropped.

Now he just has a room with a doozy of a first step. Probably he could still push someone through the door and down into the piranhas' playground in a pinch, but it would never achieve the cinematography inherent in the slow crumbling of the cubes.

Drakken pulls the tape into one more loop around the bottom of the doorway and lets out a sigh that echoes off the cavernous walls. The reverberations spread the sound waves further apart, plunging them to menacing depths. It's the ideal time to practice his villainous verbal tics, because the lair is empty, almost depressingly so. His henchmen are probably still up in Minnesota for Fred's niece's wedding. The knights in shining armor he hired from Middleton Medieval quit as soon as that buffoonish boy knocked them out of the room. They turned out to be only mid-evil themselves, unprepared to fight off his teenage nemesises. . .

Nemesi? What is the plural of "nemesis"? Shego would know, though Drakken isn't sure he wants to open himself up to that kind of scorn again so soon. Besides, she's not here, either. Left early yesterday evening because she had another _date_.

The idea staggers across Drakken's mind. He's no fool - well, not usually - and he's seen what Shego can trigger in the male of the species. The stares, the leers, the whistles - well, Drakken supposes he's _heard_ the last one as opposed to seeing it, but its strength almost solidified it. Drakken can easily visualize it as a living tiger, stalking his sidekick, turning her from predator to prey.

Drakken raises the scissors to snip the needed quantity of supervillain tape off the roll. He doesn't realize his hands are shaking until one finger jumps into the scissors' path and is neatly relieved of the tip of its glove. Blast. These were a new pair, too.

Shaking his finger just to make sure the blades didn't touch it, Drakken glowers in the door's direction once more and stalks back into the Thinking Room.

It isn't just Shego and the henchmen and the knight roleplayers who are missing. It almost feels like Drakken himself is missing, too - at least a large section of his hippocampus. His intelligence seems to have been sucked away with a gigantic straw, leaving behind a muddled husk of a head.

Drakken glances at the wastebasket, at every wastebasket in the room. All of them overflow with crumpled-up sheets of failed brainstorms. Make that brain scattered showers. Pictures only a mother could love, things that no evil villain worth his salt _or_ his pepper would ever think to draw!

All right, so every now and then he takes comfort in those thoughts in the middle of a thunderstorm-night. That doesn't mean they're _part_ of him, any more than the warm milk he'll drink to lull himself back to sleep is.

The doorbell plays the soundtrack from some scary film, and Drakken hustles toward the door. Even if it turns out to be a Pixie Scout soliciting muffins, he's grateful for the interruption.

Outside, the day is gray and gloomy-Gus-y, perfect for a post-defeat mope. It's no Pixie Scout who is revealed when the door slides open. The floodlights shine on her, forming a wiry shadow composed of at least two-thirds hair behind her. It's the one person who could scale the slope of packed earth this lair sits on and still have any oxygen left in reserve.

Shego.

She must have showered after her date, because the makeup is gone - no more black tracer around her eyes - and she doesn't smell like a garden party anymore. Drakken is grateful for _that_, too. Shego having an identifiable scent is like that little girl who Charlie Brown pines for having an actual name. It just isn't done.

"Shego!" Drakken squawks in relief. She survived her date.

He doesn't hear exasperation when she says, "Morning, Dr. D." That means she is in a good mood for Shego, which means it might be safe to ask some questions.

Drakken shifts from one foot to the other, shoving his hands behind his back to hide the scissor-hole. "So I take it you and your date made out okay last night?"

_**STOP.**_

Drakken feels the flush crawling up the back of his neck at the very instant it's too late to abort the question's launch. The points of Shego's face are Granny-Smith-green in the lair's dimness, and they all look ready to leap off and cut him to shreds. The English language has played a trick on him again. Though not as steadfast and true, certain words are like certain chemicals: each harmless on its own, but when mixed together they create a biohazard faster than you can peel a peanut.

(He speaks from experience. Had to leave that peanut behind. It probably turned radioactive or something.)

"You have thirty seconds to rephrase that sentence," Shego says, with nostrils poofed.

Oh, soda and fizz, now he's being _timed_? "I - I - I - I - how - date - was - it?" Drakken manages to sputter and hopes that counts as a rephrase.

"It was all right," Shego says in perfect nonchalance, as if the threat of a moment ago was nothing more than a short dream. "Might see him again." She shrugs. "Then again, I might not."

Her eyebrows, which no longer have that deadly pinch between them, wiggle Drakken's direction, and something seems to stab him from the inside. She looks so young in that moment, and he feels like he ought to be able to. . . he doesn't know. . . put police tape around _her_, maybe? Warn the lecherous young men of her generation to prowl elsewhere?

Those both require a considerable amount of planning, and his IQ is still regrouping from yesterday. So Drakken does the only other thing he can do, instead. He jogs with Shego from the lab into the hallway - all a dim, murky blue that makes his own shade look sturdier and more masculine. She is shorter than he is, a bit, but her legs reach longer, so Drakken has to pump his as if he's riding a bike to keep up with her her. "Don't go in that room," Drakken says, nodding toward the taped-up door. "There's nothing but a piranha pit down there."

"Thanks, Doc." Shego's lips twitch. "And here I mistook all that police tape for a welcome mat."

Drakken crosses his arms and glares at her as he makes sure she taps past the door without ever veering toward it. He is annoyed with her, but not _that_ annoyed.

His thoughts circle back to the wastebasket before he can stop it, and doubt scrunches his spine into a knot. It does not take much of whatever brainpower he has left to imagine Shego saying, "Yeah. And if the piranhas don't work, you can finish them off with your hand-turkeys."

Stupid. The whole thing is stupid. Drakken places both palms to his temples and tries to flood his consciousness with better thoughts, more upbeat ones, perhaps the tune to that one rock-and-roll song they keep playing at Smarty Mart: "Ain't Got Nothing to Prove."

Except their grasp of grammar. Drakken doesn't _need_ Shego's advice to remind him that's a double negative, and two negatives make a positive, just like with numbers -

Oh, of _course_.

"Shego, that's it!" Drakken exclaims. He pokes a finger into the air and doesn't care that it's the one with the hole.

"What's what?" Shego says, voice bored.

"Why I got stu - less smart after hitting myself with Project Phoebus!" Drakken cries. He can't say the other word - the word that means the-opposite-of-smart. Not about himself.

Shego lands, feather-like, on a chair and pulls a rolled-up magazine from its cushion. "I thought that you thought the Boy Wonder stole your genius."

"That was my first theory." Drakken hunches to pace, and his hands fit together just the way they should for a maniacal rub. "It lasted until we got the boy here and he was as brainless as ever."

Shego's grunt is noncommittal.

It's true, though. Drakken had given him a room stocked with potential death traps, and the kid had taped a broom to a vacuum. He must have done something in school, cheated, something forbidden by the good guy's code of ethics, and the only dumb thing Drakken did was fall for it. He can still see himself - pressing toward a wall that wasn't as sturdy as it should have been, ground less trustworthy beneath him, mental circuits working overtime to convince himself that it didn't _matter_ what the plural of "fish" was; what _mattered_ was that they would eat this lying little creep of a kid.

"Now, however, I finally know the answer!" Drakken says. "I was already so close to the pinnacle of human brilliance that the Phebus Project's signal rays were practically identical to the neurons in my own brain! They collided and canceled each other out, leading to a drastic mental deterioratedness!"

"Deterioration," Shego says.

"Precisely my point!" Drakken rubs his hands some more, building up friction, a static charge that he envisions bringing the whole world to its figurative knees. "A negative and a negative make a positive. A smart and a smart make a. . . well, you get the point," he finishes awkwardly, using one toe to nudge a ragged ball of paper under the desk and out of sight. He doesn't even want to remember what he drew on it.

Shego puts her head in her hands. "Yep. That's _gotta_ be it, Doc. No other explanation."

You could peel the sarcasm off her like a sunburn. . . something _else_ Drakken has far too much experience with. This time, though, this time he doesn't care. The Phebus Project is rumored to wear off within a few days. All he has to do is take it easy and wait for his intellectual superiority to return.

And once it does. . . Drakken's rubbing gets faster and faster. . . once it does, he can rebuild the drop-away floor, cube by cube. With his brain back at full operating capacity, he'll be able to think of a way to retrieve the cubes from the pit - remote-operated drones, probably - and a way to suspend them until he has enough of them that they can support each other. Why, he'll be so genuisfied, he'll be able to reconstruct the entire trap to scale!

Make that scales. Lots of them. Heh - fish pun.

(Or fishes.)

_Whatever. It better come back fast, though,_ Drakken thinks as his fingers tap dance on his thighs. He's never been very good at "taking it easy."


	11. Two to Tutor

**~Because sometimes a cameo appearance deserves to be elaborated on...  
**

**To my guest reviewer: I can see where you're coming from with Shego's age. The show's creators, though, have stated her to be "in her early twenties," so that's what I go with. As for Emotion Sickness - I'm planning to get to it, but in the meantime, I have a story from Shego's POV showing how her Moodulator deactivated. It's in my _Assorted Ficlets_ story, the chapter titled "PMS (Perfectly Moodulated Syndrome)." Hope you enjoy! :)~**

_11\. Always stay close by._

A sound like a screeching bat rises from the empty hovercraft seat beside Drakken. He startles only halfway, catching himself before he somersaults over the lip and onto the scorching desert sands below. Unfortunately, the catch overcorrects him to his left, and he watches the sky sway above him before his ear collides with the seat next door.

The seat that's not _entirely_ empty.

"Ow, ow," Drakken mutters even as he drags himself to a vertical position once more and fights to maintain his grip on his brand-new cell phone. It feels like a compact little bomb in his hands, a sensation he could certainly get used to. One glance at the Caller ID on the screen, and the pain retreats to some unimportant compartment.

_Shego_.

Drakken can feel himself breaking into an open-mouthed grin, and he keeps grinning even when the desert wind deposits grit between his teeth. Gosh, he'd hate to live in this place. This filthy, burning place, though, is where the breaking news on the radio told him Shego has been captured, along with her "accomplice."

The boy. Junior. The younger Senior. What an oxymoronic existence.

They were taken into custody on a police helicopter.

Drakken takes a moment to frown at the choice of weaponry in his pocket before he shrugs and lifts the hovercraft into the air. If they're already in a helicopter, his Gravitomic Ray likely won't be of much good. But it was the first thing in the lab that didn't have a sticky note attached to it, warning him in his own handwriting that it was "still under construction." His Destructo-Bots aren't even close to battle-ready yet, and the brain-tap machine was too bulky and wouldn't fold down into the hovercraft.

Ah, well. He'll rescue Shego even if he has to. . . if he has to . .

_What is it people do when they have to fight without weapons, again?_

It doesn't turn out to matter. No weapons are necessary. When Drakken catches up with the police helicopter, Shego is already catching the breeze herself, surfing on her sky-board, her hair flapping behind her in a black flag. Drakken doesn't know enough about naval history to say for certain what a black flag means, but basic knowledge tells him it is the exact opposite of a white flag and, therefore, the exact opposite of surrender.

Shego glances back over her shoulder at him, a quick peek through the wind-snapped mane, and then turns around to look straight-on at the helicopter again. Even while Drakken watches, Shego smooches her lips to her fingers and then blows across them as if she is attempting to scatter something to the breeze - but what? An airborne toxin? A sleeping powder of some kind? Lipstick?

Lipstick?

_. . . Oh._

Shego is grinning back at the helicopter in a way Drakken has never seen before. It glows all over her face like a dime straight from the mint. Ordinarily, he would compare it to something fierce, something dangerous, like a freshly-assembled Malicious Robot of Destruction.

But her usual gracefulness appears lighter today, spread wider, her knees bent only to keep her balance, her jaw unclenched, her forehead smooth where it usually looks cramped. It takes Drakken a moment to realize what he's witnessing - or rather, what he's _not_ witnessing.

It's Shego - with a complete lack of underlying anger, a surface Drakken had always assumed was _supposed_ to have ripples now suddenly calm.

Drakken comes to attention, despite the pain in his lumbar region that accuses him of moving it too fast. He waves at Shego, air currents lashing his own ponytail back and forth so fast he can almost hear it.

Shego plinks into the passenger's seat, all precision and poise. The sky-board continues to float parallel to them until Shego pokes its retraction button and stores it beneath her seat without even an atom of it sticking out anywhere.

"Welcome back, Shego!" Drakken greets her.

Shego tips her head at him in acknowledgment. Silence falls, one that's usually comfortable when Shego has nothing sassy to say and he has nothing important to say. But he _does_ have something important to say. Questions are buzzing from one brainwave to the next, with some of Drew Lipsky's throwback shyness holding them in. It is suddenly pure scientific law that Shego must be the one to incite a reaction, get the conversation going.

She never does, though.

Once they are back at the suburban lair, Drakken escorts her down the hallway into his lab, past the Destructo-Bot prototypes, and feels himself perking a little. This is the part where any polite person will ask how his work on them has been going.

Yet the only thing Shego says is, "Hey, thanks for picking me up."

All right, so it's better than nothing. _Am I supposed to accept that?_

No, if he were one to accept a life of such quality, he wouldn't be in the business of world domination.

Drakken flounces onto his chair and hunches over a paper on his desk. _Fine, then! If she's not going to ask, I shall just ignore her. And - ooh! - then when she does try to talk to me, I can tell her I don't like to be disturbed from my studies._

She is just an employee, after all.

More silence. Drakken can no longer bring whatever he's doodling on the paper into focus.

When he looks up, Shego is almost to the lab doorway. He thought he would hear her leaving, but of course he didn't. Shego enters and exits rooms as soundlessly as night falls - which is later and later these days.

"Shego, wait!" Drakken yelps before his chest can crack wide open. "How was your vacation?"

Shego turns back to face him, eyes pinched with mild annoyance. "It was very much NOT a vacation." Then, to Drakken's surprise, she brings the smile back. "It was a tutoring job, and it went great. The Seniors are sorta weird, but - eh, they pay well."

Drakken swallows, hoping that, too, is inaudible. He's never _met_ the Seniors, can't call up any mental portraits of them, but he remembers seeing their vague shapes at last year's villain convention. He tried to do with them what he did with all the other villains at the gathering - feel sorry for them because no matter how hard they try, they aren't Dr. Drakken - but it's hard to pity someone who arrives on their own private jet.

"Really?" Drakken says. It's three keys too high, and he sniffs and coughs and thumps on his neck until he can sense the boom returning. "What's their lair like?"

"Like a really nice hotel," Shego says. "It was their home way before it was a lair, so it's still got that touch. Think lots of glass but super-comfy chairs. And _tons_ of HenchCo traps hidden in the walls."

He was right, he was _right_. The Seniors are super-rich. If they can afford to buy from Jack Hench, they can offer Shego the salary of her dreams. Plush living quarters. A workout area and a jacuzzi right on the premises.

Now, Drakken - this month he can pay either Shego's paycheck or the electricity bill for this lair. Obviously, Shego's paycheck has to win out. He can always go back to his haunted-island lair, where everything is paid off. . . or is it? Does he have to usurp one of Dementor's old time-shares again?

Drakken is suddenly beset with the picture of Shego slipping out of his world and into the Seniors' as easily as she slid into the hovercraft.

Every part of his anatomy feels jammed, welded into place, incapable of moving and supporting him. Even with the towering ceiling above him, he hovers on the verge of claustrophobia.

And when he looks at himself in that scenario, he sees not the dwindling chances of world domination, but a big fat gulping, gaping void._ So much for just an employee,_ he thinks, mad at himself and madder at Shego and maddest at the Seniors.

Drakken squirms in his swiveling desk chair. It's too small now, and he misses the grand high arches of his tall chairs back at the haunted island lair. "Did - did they treat you well?" Drakken says. And squirms again. It's not like he _wants_ the answer to be no.

Except he sort of does.

Everyone should be good to Shego, but if they were - what chance does his employ have?

"Are you kidding?" Shego says. "Senior is about as gentlemanly as they come. He's got style. A really old-fashioned kind of style, but -" she shrugs - "it works on him."

The implications in her voice are sharp, and Drakken doesn't wish to excavate them. "What about - your student? The boy?"

"Junior? He's great. Got a _lot_ of potential." The smile melts at the sides into something almost . . . soft. It looks strange, out of place, because normally when you look at her you get the impression she was chiseled out of marble. "I don't know how Kimmy knew to be there guarding the world's most precious cookie recipe, but it wasn't anything he did wrong."

That's even odder, though Drakken doesn't care. Anticipatory drool springs into his mouth. "The Granny recipe? For me? Oh, Shego, you shouldn't have!"

"That's good, because I didn't." Shego smirks, turning older and recognizable as herself. "It was more of a test for the kid than anything. And he did pretty darn well for his first scheme."

"If you'd ended up with the recipe, though, could I have had it?" Drakken asks. "At least a copy?"

Shego shrugs again. "Sure."

_The kid_, she called him. But he's old enough to be arrested. . . That would put him - just about Shego's age.

Drakken's hands fumble beneath his chair and select the height lever and unfortunately squeeze it all the way, so he sits below Shego's level. "Well, I thought you were arrested. But when I got there, you were. . . _not_ arrested. How'd you get loose?"

"Easy," Shego says. "Senior posed as a policeman and took us away. He uncuffed me and told me to split."

"He kicked you out?" Drakken's pulse gallops in his throat.

"Yep," Shego says. "I think he was getting a little jealous of how much time his son was spending with me. But of course he was classy about it."

There's admiration in the way she speaks. Undeniably so. It definitely distracts Drakken from trying to form some clever wordplay about the "recipe for dessert in the desert."

Drakken nearly collapses back across his desk and barely manages to nod when Shego says, "Satisfied?" She strolls from the room, and he watches her, grateful for the years and the recognizability and the other things that have come back and chased away the mock-up of a schoolgirl crush.

_Thank you, thank you, Senior._ Looks like Drakken isn't the only one who doesn't want to lose his family to some interloper.

_Family._

Drakken stops with his hand on the height lever. One more tweak, and he might go through the floor, but his hands have stopped moving. That's what Shego is to him - a relative in evil. His family.

He hugs the idea to himself and doesn't let it go.


	12. Car Trouble

_12\. Do not get attached to ideas that clearly won't work. If it requires help from anyone except Shego or - perish the thought - the henchmen, just move on to something else._

The handcuffs are the worst part, Drakken decides. Handcuffs make it impossible for you to sit peaceably or to smooth the remaining strands of your singed hair over a cold swirl on your scalp that you know must be a bald spot, or to wipe the soot from your face and tend to the patches of heat underneath.

Across from him, Shego might as well by on fire herself. It comes off her in waves. Soot smears her cheek as well, glaring out from within a massive flare of frizz. If she lost any hair in the hovercraft explosion, it's hard to tell. You could still turn someone approximately his mother's size loose in there and never find her again.

_What happ -_

Drakken doesn't even get a chance to think it before someone says, "Thanks for your help, Miss."

He peers out the back of the paddy wagon door they have yet to close. There she is, all redheaded and smug-faced, leaning against the car he saw first in Freeman's garage and later when she parked outside the warehouse. He knows for a fact that he killed her half an hour ago, and she's still in better condition than he is.

The word _indestructible_ invades his mind.

"Kim Possible!" Drakken hollers before the doors can slam shut over his voice. "You think your car is all that, but it's not!"

Kim Possible just nods and grins at him, her belly button winking at him in mockery. Drakken wants to leap from the paddy wagon and throw a proper shirt on the girl. Beside her stand her idiotic friend and . . . Freeman.

Oh. Right. He left Freeman in the warehouse with the molten metal that was once his Destructo-Bots, too. Left him there to die.

Drakken tries to rub his crushed-together wrists. It means nothing to him that Freeman fixed his Destructo-Bots. The man was simply paying his dues to his fellow scientist and soon-to-be ruler.

What Drakken can't squirm away from is the memory of the party hat plopped onto Freeman's head, the snug crook of Freeman's arm through his, the exclamations of Freeman's joy mingling with Drakken's. No one. . . no one has ever been _excited_ like that with him before.

Kim Possible is still alive. So is Freeman.

Drakken will leave the ethical exchange rate to a non-evil scientist who actually cares.

Winter seems to descend from the ceiling, blowing across the bald lump on the back of his neck. Why do they crank the air conditioning in these paddy wagons up so high when it's scarcely spring yet?

Now his Destructo-Bots' sacrifice was for naught. Which makes it not a sacrifice at all, just a waste.

Drakken's handcuffs hitch at the base of his spinal column. He crunches his teeth together, but the scream building behind them will chip their porcelain right off if he holds it again. With a flip of his head, he turns to glare at Shego. "You thought it was a good idea to melt the Destructo-Bots, and look at where that got us! We're still going to jail, Kim Possible is still around, and now my lovely Destructo-Bots -" He stops and punches back his shoulders. "See if I ever listen to _you_ again!"

Somehow, without moving, Shego bears down on him, the tendons in her cheeks taut. "Mmm-hmm. None of this would have happened if you could have just fixed your own stupid Destruct-Droids in the first place."

Drakken howls before he know he's doing it, because surely he has just been splashed with a bucket of scalding water in disguise as words. She says it so dismissively, so disdainfully, as if he were simply lazy or stupid, when she was there - she watched him mold the metal panels, assemble them, connect the wires, pore over their voice recognition software. When he couldn't fix their little glitch of seeing each other as the enemies, he studied that portion of their programming until his contacts nearly fell out and then decided he needed another set of eyes.

She was _there_. She _saw_.

And they would have been perfect. Absolutely perfect, bring-the-world-down perfect. If only he could have fixed them.

But he couldn't.

The thought is depressing enough that Drakken's ego begins to twist and churn inside him. He sits back against the wall, feeling those awful, deplorable handcuffs cut into his fragile skin, and he clenches his face so that nothing less than cold will show up on it. Considering the chilly interior of this prison-on-wheels, it isn't especially difficult.

Once they arrive at Middleton County Jail, Drakken and Shego are separated. In spite of her hatefulness, Drakken can still hardly force his feet to walk in the opposite direction from where she's being led. Shego, on the other hand, seems to practically march away from _him_.

Drakken pauses in front of a mirror to inspect the damages. Nothing obscenely worse than the rest of him, he decides. Except for the bald spots - two or three of them, at least. Freakish and menacing, they emphasize how long and narrow his skull is, the bulbous rounding of his chin at the end, his overhanging brow bone.

Actually, not a bad look, especially when paired with a sinister sneer that Drakken quickly adds. Kind of a Lex Luthor aura. Multi-billionaire bald supervillain. With the extra benefit of being _blue_, to boot! He could pull it off if he shaved his head - and earned several billion dollars.

As soon as the words_ shaved his head_ enter his brain, the head in question snaps away from the mirror, and he feels what's left of his hair quiver at the nape of his neck, smudging ash on it. The bald halos on his scalp feel so naked, so vulnerable, bared to the world; Drakken can only imagine how it would chill with the whole thing exposed. Anyone, anyone at all, could sneak up behind him and deliver a high-damage blow, especially if he ends up getting delivered to the state pen before Shego comes up with a way to bust them both out of here.

Drakken shivers and hustles down the hall toward the cell that will house him for the next several days. He is like his Destructo-Bots - the most brilliant of his kind, the sharpest, the deadliest. Would be perfect for world domination and nothing would be able to stop him.

Except that one glitch. In his case, that's fear.

As soon as he figures out how to disable it, Kim Possible and her little band of do-gooders - their days are numbered, and he's not talking on calendar squares. Well, their days are numbered anyway, Drakken realizes, unless she's immortal on top of everything else.

Honestly, it wouldn't surprise him much.


	13. Job Unfair

**~Hello, once again!**

**To my guest reviewer: Sorry for not getting back to you last chapter. To answer your questions,1. I think Ron mostly said "A lot older" to tick Shego off. XD But she _was_ claiming to be only three years older than Kim, which even I agree is too young for her by Season Four. Even if there was an age difference of nine years (which would qualify as a "lot older" to me), that would still only leave Shego 26 or 27. But that's just my 2 cents. (Also, you met John DiMaggio? I'm so jealous! :D)**

**2\. I don't _hate _D/S by any means, but it's also not my OTP by a long shot, either. They have a great dynamic, but for the overwhelming majority of the series it's much more familial than anything else. Originally, I balked for one the same reasons you mentioned - the age difference (once I found out that Drakken isn't as young as he looks/acts) made it seem creepy. Now that doesn't bother me so much, because I know Drakken well enough to know he's no creeper, but I think it would affect the way they see each other; I imagine Drakken would see Shego as an annoying little girl and Shego would see Drakken as a weird old man. I always want them to be part of each others' lives, but they're at such different emotional maturities I'm not sure they could give each other what they needed romantically.  
**

**3\. I believe I remember seeing one of the writers saying the shipping hints were dropped in on _Graduation _as a present for the shippers more than they were the writers' own ideas, but I think _Graduation_ handled their relationship very well. Neither the shippers nor the non-shippers have to drastically alter canon to write what they want to, so it was very well pulled-off.**

**Hope that helps.~**

_13\. Sometimes the little details matter. Don't ever admit this to Shego, but sometimes they do._

Drakken thought this day would end with him on a throne. Or several steps closer to that ever-elusive throne at the very _least_.

He never expected to find himself buried alive in _fish_.

Flippy, floppy, scaly fish, still greasy with river scum. The stench that Drakken usually associates with fish isn't there, because they aren't dead yet, but they will be if they aren't returned to water soon, and then they will press even heavier, and he will follow. At this rate, he'd be lucky to join them in whatever corner of the hereafter has been reserved for fish.

Drakken tries to leap forward and finds himself going absolutely nowhere. A pair of gills thrums under his gloved palm. It's like being in some awful horror movie - _Suffocation By Fish_. Drakken can almost picture himself in the starring role, looking charming and strong with a little face-paint and a little sleeve-padding, sinking dramatically beneath a pile of flipping fins and wheezing his final breaths.

Except - holy helium, it just might _be_ his final breaths. And he hasn't even prepared a Death Speech Of Extreme Significance yet! What kind of supervillain goes down without a Death Speech Of Extreme Significance?

No! He will fight.

Drakken shoves one arm up through the slippery layers of cod - or are they trout? Those are really the only two types of fish he knows. Unless you count piranhas. Good old loyal, lethal piranhas. He's suddenly glad he absconded with the Great Lakes rather than the Amazon River. Also saved on gas mileage. . .

And this is _not_ what he wants to be thinking about when he dies.

_Also - I don't want to die, I don't want to die!_

A particularly large fish somersaults onto Drakken's hand, and a scream breaks loose from him. Yes, "breaks loose" is the best term, because he certainly did not release it on his own choice. The sound is like tires skidding in gravel, and it doesn't seem to belong to a supervillain at all.

But it serves him well. A moment later, Drakken could swear someone's approaching.

Sure enough, Shego cuts her way toward him, kick-boxing fish out of the way, creating narrow, momentary gaps that she slips herself through. Drakken sees her sigh rise and fall rather than hearing it. Her hand swoops in, locks around his, and begins to tug him forward while she swings her elbows wide and clears a wide swath for the two of them. Soon - not as soon as he'd like, but soon - the control panel's knobs and switches become visible between the silvery tails.

Safety returns to Drakken's world. They may have been foreign to him yesterday, but ever since Shego stole the operator's manual that should have come with the weather machine in the _first_ place, he's known exactly which switches to switch, which toggles to toggle, and which buttons to. . . button. (Something about that sentence fell apart at the end, something that Drakken doesn't have the patience to fix.)

Creeping forward like a mighty lion on the prowl, Drakken lunges for the lever on the far right. Shego shakes her head at him, doubt splashed across her face, but he ignores her. Now is not the time to be questioning his genius.

_Not that there's_ ever _a good time,_ whispers a part of Drakken that he wishes were stronger.

At the pull of the lever, a gigantic funnel opens in the floor, and the fish are dragged out, toppling into the water below. Five lakes' worth of fish into one lake - ah, well. The environmental agents or the Fish Protection Agency will sort that out, Drakken is sure. He leans against the wall and takes big gulps of fresh air, sweet glorious fresh air that he will never take for granted again.

_Okay, good. So you did one thing right today,_ whispers a part of Drakken that he wishes were weaker.

It is such a relief that he almost forgets how funnels work until he is being pulled toward the center himself. Before he can even make any further undignified noises, Shego snags him with one hand and throws the other at the lever, yanking it back to an upright position. The floor seals shut, solidifies under him.

Shego whips around toward him. She looks about half her usual size with her hair soaked flat around her. She should be less intimidating that way, not more.

"Ya know, I seem to remember some guy telling me that it didn't matter where the fish went." Shego sounds as sweet as the fresh air itself, yet Drakken isn't fooled for a lousy second. "I wish he were here now so I could tell him how _stupid_ that was."

Drakken squares his jaw - well, no, it will never square, but he firms it in the face of Shego's unfairness. "They say sarcasm is the lowest form of humor, Shego," he says.

"Yeah, and you know what they say right after that? 'Ow, ow, I'm sorry, I take it back!'"

It is a good comeback, and unfortunately, he doesn't have a better one. Drakken folds his arms, pins them against him.

Shego's expression hardens into a furrow-carving scowl. "See, this is why you need to _actually listen to me_ every now and then. If you'd just done that today, we -"

"We still would have lost!" Drakken explodes. "Because Kim Possible, in addition to every other skill she shouldn't have, knows how to disarm a weather machine!"

"Fair enough," Shego says. "But there's something to be said for losing without drowning in fish guts."

An almost tangible recollection of the dozens of gills gasping back and forth against his clothing visits Drakken, and he shivers. "They weren't _guts_," he maintains. "But I understand your point. So - I'll listen to you a little more, and you'll listen to me a little more? Or maybe a lot more?" He sticks out his hand and waits for her to twitch a smile his way.

Instead, Shego surveys him through cynical slits. "I make no promises," she says, and then she turns and sashays away, leaving Drakken with his hand hanging in the emptiness like he tried to make an agreement with thin air.

He thinks he just might have.


	14. The Golden Years

_14\. Check your calculations. Check them, and double-check them, and triple-check them, and however-many-times-you-need-to-check them. Don't just plug them in as soon as you find them, no matter how eager you are._

Drakken leans against the back of their cute little ice cream truck's passenger seat. As it tears its way toward the Florida Interstate, its tiny bell jingles a happy tune that sounds delightfully like, _We're getting aw-ay! Ha-ha-ha-ha!_

Getting away, but look what they're leaving behind. A plan that would have been foolproof, it would have been, if his signal hadn't beamed into hearing aids instead of MP3 players and he'd had an army of teenage warriors rather than a convoy of senior citizens. A rocket so near to launch. The prospect of watching Kim Possible meet her end at the hands of her own beloved Nana - definitely his most emotionally cruel twist to date, Drakken decided as he watched Kim Possible freeze at the certainty of a fight with her forebearer.

And that _lair_! What a gorgeous, Gothic dump. Moss and mildew on the walls. Creaking floorboards - a spook-tactic that, in Drakken's opinion, never got old. High, vaulted ceilings. Dim lighting. Enough space for a line of computer monitors. Best of all - _alligators_. His very own alligators. Who needed to buy from HenchCo when the swamp was so generous with its death-trap supplies?

Not him.

_At least we're escaping with our lives. And this ice cream truck. And all those Fruity Lickies._

The thought doesn't make him as happy as it should. In fact, Drakken's stomach is writing a very strongly worded protest against any further discussion. He doesn't taste nausea, but he can feel it, all the way up his gullet. Even with the window down, the air is muggy and humid enough to wash your hands in.

Drakken pulls away from the seat belt strapped across his middle. His cousin Eddy always insisted that women couldn't drive, but Shego is giving Eddy a run for his money. Make that a _drive_, a 120-MPH drive, for his money. "Um, Shego?" Drakken pipes up. "Do you think you could maybe - slow down? Just a tad?"

Shego doesn't even glance his direction. "Um, Drakken. No. That kind of defeats the purpose of a getaway car."

The palm trees pass in a dizzying blur. "No, I am very much aware of the purpose of a getaway car!" Drakken snaps. "And you're doing a great job with it, except it's making me just the tiniest little bit -" he shifts in his seat - "queasy. And I don't usually get carsick, so -"

"So of course it must be my driving, and not the fact that you haven't eaten anything but lemon squares for the past two days and just took a kick to the gut." Shego's entire body stiffens into a stick of graphite.

Oh. Gee. When she puts it _that_ way - well, Drakken can remember himself letting the pan of lemon squares tumble to the ground as they pulled away from the lair, unconsciously aware that he couldn't be made to hold another sugary bite.

Drakken puts a curious hand to his stomach, which declines to comment. Just whose side it is on, anyway?

"Look, there are all kinds of empty sacks in the back." Shego sniffs. "Get one if you need it, because I am not cleaning -"

"Yes, _thank_ you, Shego!" Drakken says hastily. He can feel himself going pale, the color draining out of him until he is as near-translucent as she is. Still, he sits his absolute straightest and with great effort raises his face to the windshield, determined to look the least shriveled he possibly can. "It's not that bad," he assures both of them.

A heat wave ripples across Drakken's shoulders, skimming the stains still damp from old-person saliva. Yick. It's not that an elderly person's spit ever becomes corrosive like the older creatures in that comic book he read once; it's just that he never thought he'd be wet from it. Sweat or rain, yes. Senior citizens' saliva, no. The dentures that pinned him against the wall had missed his flesh by inches, and glistening gums held him there. Drakken has created lifelike robots before and never been frightened by them, but this one particular bit of realism made his own gums cringe.

And then the army of teenagers that Drakken was _supposed_ to have in the first place had burst in, with their boom boxes and their pom-poms and their skimpy bathing costumes. The blond kid at the front, busting moves (a phrase Drakken learned from his teen-slang book) that would undoubtedly bust an ankle in a few short minutes, looked somewhat familiar, but all Drakken had cared about were the false mouths attached to him.

It was actually a stroke of luck, because they threw a party, as teenagers are wont to do on spring break, which allowed Drakken and Shego to slip out of the lair and put about fifty bodies between them and Kim Possible. Yet it's still sour in Drakken's memory. Now the teenagers are going to use his off-the-heezy evil hideout as a den to. . . snort marijuana or whatever illicit things teens do today.

How could he have erred so badly with his brain wave interference, _how_? Surely he was only a wavelength or two off. Surely something went wrong somewhere other than his head. . . right?

_Let's see. If A = B and E=MC(squared), and I divide the trajectory by the frequency - aw, heck. I'll have to write it down._

Drakken leans forward, reaching for the evil sketchpad beneath his seat. He never makes it that far. Shego's arm collides with his chest and pushes him backward. "What the heck are you doing?" she demands.

"I need a pen and paper! Keep both hands on the wheel, Shego!" Drakken says. He flashes his teeth the way the alligators always did at feeding time.

"Keep both eyes on the horizon, Drakken!" Shego says, mocking his tone. "Or at least pretend you remember what happens when a carsick person decides to look down at a sheet of paper."

"Oh." Drakken swallows against the knowledge. "Fine. I guess I'll have to - um - do it another time. I'm already working on another evil plan," he feels the need to add. If Shego knew he was investigating the cause of this particular failure - and, _gosh_, how he abhors that word! - her wisecracks would become Eternal Flames.

"Yay. What great news," Shego says with utter flatness. For a moment, he thinks he might abhor her, too, even as she speeds the two of them away from the Possibles and their belly-busting kicks.

Drakken remains iron-stiff in his seat and runs one hand down over the length of his stomach, wincing at the depths of it. He wants to be an alligator, flashy and sharp-toothed and ready to dismember. But he feels more like a manatee, floating dismally beneath the surface of the water, stuffed and slow with lemon squares.

An alligator wouldn't have had so much fun selling ice cream, either, Drakken realizes uneasily.


	15. Rufus vs Commodore Puddles

_15\. Always check for stowaways before commandeering a vehicle. Although, I guess, in this case,_ you _were the stowaway. That's the problem._

Drakken lifts his head and spits sand from his mouth. His eyelashes are crusted with more of the same, so he knows he must resemble one of the geckos he saw at Smarty Mart last month.

_Okay, think, Drakken, think. Where are you?_

Drakken raises a hand to his temple and immediately wishes he hadn't. Black holes form in his vision, sucking up sand and stone and burning, cloudless sky. He lets his arm flop back to the ground and stay there until the details shiver back into place.

Sand, sand, and more sand.

_Get up! Get up!_

Drakken drags himself to his knees. Just because he doesn't remember anything about last night doesn't mean he should sprawl around the ground like some common drunk. Although, he thinks with a rising dread, he probably looks the part right now.

He curls his fingers into the ground, which shakes beneath him. His eyelids droop heavy, though every other cell in his body is doing jumping jacks. Demanding he take this like a man, like a supervillain who fears nothing, like a supervillain whose side doesn't feel like it has been trampled by an elephant.

"Shego?" Drakken calls.

The wind takes his voice and flings it in at least seven different directions. No Shego in sight.

Did - did he have a fight with her last night? And she blasted him all the way to Arizona or wherever? Because that would explain a lot. . .

Ordinarily, the thought of being on his own would be thrilling - an opportunity to prove his own competence and usefulness. But the ground is sloping at an obtuse angle, and how is anyone supposed to prove themselves climbing a hypotenuse? Is that even within the realm of human achievement?

_Get up!_

_I can't!_

_Move. At least move!_

Hand over hand, Drakken drags himself across the ground. The tears jump forward, and he lets them only because they are necessary for lubricating the eye. Whatever he did last night, it did not involve remembering to take his contacts out.

Dimly, Drakken registers a stabbing pain in the crook of his arm. Not knife-stabbing, closer to tip-of-a-ballpoint-pen stabbing. Though scientific curiosity tempts him to lift his sleeve and examine the site, he refuses to. Rolling up his sleeve, especially a sleeve as weighed down by sand as his currently is, will expend energy he cannot afford. His personal power plant isn't converting potential to kinetic as it should, that's all. It's not because he's afraid to look.

Not a bit.

No oasis ever manifests. What _does_ is a sign, similar to the kind you see on the highway, announcing that AREA 51 is only a few miles away.

Area 51.

The memories run Drakken over like ten-ton trucks. Of course. His shrink ray becoming a grow ray because he forgot what tiny bladders puppies have. His daring raid on Area 51. The dog whistles. The giant mole rat. Culminating in the capture of Shego and Commodore Puddles, two of the very small number of people in the world who he loves.

And, yes, Commodore Puddles counts as a person! Not a human, but certainly a person. There is at least a theoretical difference, right?

Drakken would rather debate the semantics with himself for hours than remember the next part - his sneaking away in an alien spaceship the government had confiscated. Only for some stupid, _stupid_ reason they neglected to confiscate the aliens _from_ the ship. They were still there, floating in the air, see-through and bulgy-eyed, reaching for Drakken with vaporous fingers, not listening to Drakken's frantic apologies and attempts at peacemaking, because they probably don't speak English - why would they?

Closer. Closer. He squeezed his legs together, begging not to have a case of _like puppy, like owner_. They found him with their grips, fog made flesh, and he screamed -

And he doesn't remember the rest.

Was he hurt? Maimed? Killed?

Well - Drakken chuckles a little - he can't have been _killed_. Otherwise, this would be a very uncreative afterlife.

If there's such a thing as imaginary kinetic energy, Drakken gets a boost of it now. He struggles to his feet and bares his arm before he can lose his nerve. A tiny bruised knot stands in his inner elbow. Exactly the kind that bloomed three years ago when he -

When he had his blood drawn.

Drakken sways to the side and grasps for the sign. Ends up holding his other wrist instead. It feels scratchy, something his glove never is, and when Drakken glances down at it, he sees what looks to be a price tag cinched tightly around it. A garbled symbol, like an infinity sign interlocked with the number 14, shimmers in iridescent mauve paint.

He was right about them not speaking any English, but any scientist knows a tag when he sees it.

The string rips between Drakken's fingers, and the rest of his strength wavers on the edge of nonexistence. With a full-body quiver, he rears back and throws the tag far, far away. Well, he attempts to. It's not very aerodynamic, and it sticks to his hand, and he has to flick it away with sharp, frantic movements of his pinkie finger as his feet scramble backward, sand hissing under the soles of his boots.

Drakken turns around and hugs the sign for support, grateful it can't hug him back. All right - can't think about this anymore. Has to think about his sidekick, his puppy. His desert lair isn't far from here, and with any luck the government is too busy mopping up its spilled secrets to have gotten to it yet. The shrink-turned-grow ray might still be there. If not, there are probably enough parts lying around for him to construct a decent weapon.

Although he really likes the image of stomping _over_ Area 51's fence in one step and stepping on whatever government agents get in his way, plucking Shego from the wreckage of her cell, and carrying her - gently - away, Commodore Puddles trotting at his side. It's the only image big enough to push out the thoughts of the tag and the blood-dot.

Drakken takes one last long look at his shadow. It appears taller than he is, with longer legs and sturdier biceps. Something about the sight infuses what remains of his blood with courage. He hauls in scorching air and begins to lurch off in the direction he came from.


	16. A Sitch in Time - Present

**~Sorry for the long wait, guys! Here's the next one. Thanks for sticking with me. :)~  
**

_16\. Villain team-ups don't just give crossover appeal to comic books. They can be very beneficial in the real world, too! Another set - or two - of hands makes up for the occasional dissent._

The interior of the timestream is a fiery red-orange like the sides of a flame, or like the big fireball candy Drakken remembers consuming last Halloween. (_Jawbreakers_, they were called, though the candy hasn't been built yet that can stand up to Dr. Drakken's mighty teeth!) Elements hurtle past too quickly for even the world's smartest chemist - which would be him - to identify them. He is in a massive shaft where the Doppler Effect does not exist, sliding backward across the ages.

Hurricane winds couldn't tear the grin off Drakken's lips. Here he is, in a tunnel through the fourth dimension, riding an elevator through a world hitherto unaccessable by man (or woman)! Now its operation is in Drakken's hands. Well, technically, it's in Monkey Fist's big hairy monkey-hands at the moment, and as well as they match the Tempus Simia's stone image, Drakken can't help but think it is a mistake for it to be there.

Right now, though, he's too flabbergasted to care. Reruns of history flick past him in every direction, and Drakken picks out a few favorites. The splitting of the atom. The invention of the light bulb. The discovery of radium.

And, of course, there's the starting-off place - Kim Possible's open-mouthed expression as the portal bloomed in front of her. It was only about the third or fourth time Drakken had seen her look confused, and he put that look there, as surely as if he leaned over and fixed it to her face himself.

Duff Killigan calls something from ahead, something that doesn't reach back to where Drakken is.

"What?" Drakken flaps his arms and splashes his legs, treading water - treading time - until he is level with Killigan. They've been in the portal for quite awhile now, moving ever forward, and yet they don't seem to be getting any closer to the golden-black at its center.

"Test run!" Killigan repeats. "This gadget here is ancient, and we'd better make sure it still works before we put it to use!"

"Ah, yes!" Drakken nods. "My thoughts exactly!" and it's not a lie. They _would_ have been his thoughts exactly if he had been able to think straight. Hey, who _wouldn't_ get distracted by catching a glimpse of Alfred Nobel himself at work?

"It's not ancient, it's an _antique_," Monkey Fist says in that dismissive way that always reminds Drakken of a flicking wrist. "And I was planning to touch us down at the first ancient Olympics."

"Ew." Shego's voice cuts from over Drakken's shoulder. "Weren't they underdressed? Like, a _lot_ underdressed?"

Drakken turns away from her. Naked. Yes, they were naked, and Shego is smart enough that she didn't have to ask for confirmation of that particular fact. She did it solely to watch Drakken break out in blotches, and right now he would be perfectly happy plunking her in the middle of the Oregon Trail and reappearing in an instant for him that would be six months for her.

"I was thinking we could go back to the day golf was invented," Killigan muses.

"No one cares about golf, Killigan!" Drakken barks. Yes, barking is good. Good and sinister, good and authoritative. "I propose we head back to my first encounter with Kim Possible!"

Monkey Fist stares at Drakken as if he has just volunteered to charge into the Olympics while - _ahem_ \- in the buff. "We don't want to cross our own time zones this early, Drakken!"

Every science-fiction TV show he has ever seen catches up with Drakken, and he nods again, even more sagely. "Exactly! That was a test. Well done, Monkey Fist."

"How about a date that we all know but haven'a ever seen?" Killigan says. "Say, the end of World War II?"

"A good idea," Monkey Fist says as though surprised. He studies Killigan in a manner worthy of a professorship, a manner that chips away at Drakken's self-assuredness.

Or is it self-assurance? Suddenly he doesn't know _that_, either.

"V-J Day," Drakken says, because that he _does_ know, without a doubt. "The day Japan surrendered. Following the bombing of Hiroshima!"

Shego catches his arm. "Let's save the history lesson for another time, Doc. Monkey Boy - can you get us there?"

Monkey Fist tenses yet, instead of responding, he clutches the Tempus Simia close and shuts his eyes, as if he is trying to make a phone call using only his mind. Such a thing is not currently possible, but it's only a matter of seconds before Drakken is rushed forward into golden-black. . .

. . . and steps out the other side, into an overjoyed throng. Drakken searches the mass of faces for anyone he might possibly recognize, anyone who could give rise to someone he knows today, but they are all strangers, clapping and kissing and laughing and hugging. A little boy who can't be old enough to walk waves a miniature copy of the Stars and Stripes from his perch on his father's shoulder. A girl approximately Kim Possible's age gazes lovingly down at the dogeared picture in her hands and says, choking on her own tears, "Oh, my gosh - he's coming _home_!"

As if war itself is over. As if it won't erupt again anytime in the next fifty-plus years.

There will erupt this type of rejoicing when Dr. Drakken is ruler, he decides. By that time, the people will have suffered through almost sixty more years of conflict, and they'll have kept turning to political leaders who have only the courage to fix things in the short term. They will hunger for someone who can put an end to it all. Now that he has the Tempus Simia, he is magnetized, and the dream will be pulled in toward him from across the ages.

(Oooh - how dramatically lovely!)

"Whoa," Shego breathes from beside him. Her mouth is slack in disbelief. No, not disbelief - not the _Drakken-how-in-the-world-did-you-turn-all-the-henchmen-into-babies_ kind. This is a kind he's never seen on her before. It's not disbelief at all. It's awe.

Drakken can't help but applaud himself - literally applaud himself. So much applause already bounces through the happy, kissing crowd of people that he won't stand out at all. Except that he's blue. Wearing a lab coat. And his watch is a brand that won't be invented for another two decades.

Monkey Fist must have taken this into consideration, too, because another whirr sounds, and Drakken flies back through scarlet flame. Strange thing, Monkey Fist's mind. Rather like the Tempus Simia itself - all musty-dusty and hidden, so you'd think it wouldn't be effective, but it is. Drakken's own is brilliant - a _thousand_ times brillianter - but rather prone to overloading and shorting out.

Not this time, though. Monkey Fist has a hold on the Tempus Simia that Drakken would need superstrength to break, so Drakken slaps his palm right next to Monkey Fist's on the stone base and says, "My lair - the year from whence we came!" before anyone else can. And he doesn't let go. _Power-power-power_ reverberates through the timestream and Drakken's own bloodstream, and here is his brain, fired up and determined, controlling them both.

Monkey Fist never lets go, either. Which might be okay, considering the stone monkey could very well need another monkey holding it. That is an area outside Drakken's field of expertise.

Time fast-forwards around them, blurs of famous voices and shots of sunrise and sunset, over and over. Drakken is rushed into the center again, and then the portal spits him back out, tummy-first, across the floor of his own haunted-island lair.

_We're here!_

Drakken lies there for another several seconds, the wood cold against his scar and overdue for a varnish. It all comes twinkling down on him - the defeat of Kim Possible, the history surrounding him as he whizzed by, the actual touchdown at V-J Day, the bright colors odd and shocking on a day that he has only seen in black-and-white photographs, the near-speechlessness of Shego. Drakken turns his head to the side and laughs. And laughs. And laughs.

_This is actually happening!_

Drakken doesn't know how long this goes on - though it really doesn't matter now that time is (quite firmly) on their side, does it? Only when he sees Monkey Fist and Duff peering down at him does Drakken realize he's still sprawled on the floor. And only when Monkey Fist says, "Are you quite through with the giggling?" does it occur to Drakken that the laughter spurting from him has been far higher and frothier than it should be. He scrambles to his feet and effortlessly converts it to his shake-the-walls villainous cackle.

If anyone asks, those other noises were just vocal warm-ups.

No one does ask - they never do when he has a good explanation - so Drakken takes charge again. "I can't believe the three of us actually did it!" he cries.

"Excuse you." That's Shego from behind him, talking in bladed syllables. "The _three_ of you?"

Drakken waves his hand at her, bidding her backward. Yes, Shego did help _some_, but it was Killigan who had the idea to team up, Drakken who had the idea to use time travel, and Monkey Fist who had the idea of tracking down the legendary Tempus Simia.

"And to think," Drakken continues, "Killigan didn't believe in Mystical Monkey Power!"

Monkey Fist shakes his head. "Actually, that was you, Drakken."

Oh. Weird. He distinctly recalls it being Killigan. "No matter," Drakken says, wafting his hand again. "We're ready to head back to a different paleontological era and bring back killer dinosaurs to unleash on an unsuspecting world!"

"Riiiiiight," Shego says before Drakken even gets the opportunity to resume cackling. "Because Kimmy, who has foiled _every other plan you've ever come up with before_, totally wouldn't be able to face down an army of your pet dinos."

Drakken scowls at her. He would never have a dinosaur for a pet. He already _has_ a pet, and Commodore Puddles is still recovering from that awful experience at Area 51 - the last thing Drakken would do is bring a dinosaur home and force the poor puppy to share his rawhides with it.

"She does raise a good point, Drakken," Monkey Fist says. "Kim Possible has been the chink in our armor this whole time, and she will likely be again. Unless we take this unprecedented opportunity to destroy her before we begin."

The words send a fabulous shiver down Drakken's spinal column. "Yes!" he crows. "Yes! And I'm sure between the three of us, we can come up with a way!"

Shego coughs from behind him. In that second before anger tramples through her eyes, they look almost - well, no, not fragile. But not bulletproof, not like usual.

For a minute, Drakken deliberates on whether or not he should correct himself, and then Monkey Fist stands up all the way upright, and it makes him every bit as tall as Drakken if not a micrometer or two taller. Beneath their layer of hair, his forearms are rigid. Looking from him to Killigan, stockier and stronger in his shortness, Drakken finds himself wishing he'd spent a little more time on the golf course himself.

But the easiest way to put on ten pounds of brawn is through optical illusion. Drakken draws himself straight and inflates his chest and kicks an academic smirk into gear.

No, it will not do to seem too dependent on Shego right now.


	17. A Sitch in Time - Past

_17\. Keep track of your weapons. The Juvinator. The Tempus Simia. If you'd just kept track of one, you'd be sitting pretty. Instead, you're sitting itchy._

It never fails. As soon as they lock the handcuffs in place, the Great Itch-Off commences.

First it was his ears. Then his cheeks, where he can still detect the specter of a pimple. Then the spot on his back that he cannot reach with his wildest contortions. And, of course, his heart. Always, always his heart, a place that could only be scratched if he could phase inside himself, and even then one wrong scrape of a fingernail could prove fatal.

He had his magnificent Tempus Simia, a plan, and a well-nigh-helpless foe. He was battened down and ready for anything.

Except this.

Drakken stares down at his feet and lets himself shake, just the tiniest bit. Everything that should make him angry, lump up his throat and curl up his fists, has disappeared, outshone by the portal appearing behind Shego, the Tempus Simia snug in her arms, her parting shot of, "Later, losers!"

His eyes sting, but they're too dry.

Somehow, Drakken manages to haul his benumbed body into the back of the paddy wagon, where he meets an unpadded bench with his thigh. He yelps, but only because it seems the thing to do, not because it actually hurts.

"Well, this is another fine mess you've gotten us into, Monkey Boy," Killigan says from their perch on the opposite bench.

"Me?" Monkey Fist spits. "It was _your_ suggestion that we lay waste to the little brat while we had the chance!"

"And it was your idea to use the rock gorilla. And Drakken's idea that we come back here in the first place!"

The sound of his name spears through Drakken's stomach, and the pain awakens like a foot that's fallen asleep - in tingles that writhe and pulse almost unbearably. He jolts through the humiliation of defeat, the realization that he will have to live through the Y2K panic all over again, and the smug smiles of the Kim Possibles - identical except that the preteen version keeps her lips pressed closed over her braces - as though his suffering serves as their nourishment.

_Sure, they won't give me any of the credit, but they're all too eager to share the blame!_

"Well, as far as I'm concerned," Drakken says, shifting his now-itchy tailbone on the hard floor, "you're both stupid. I had a scheme, and if we had stuck to it, none of this would have happened!"

Monkey Fist grunts. "Except that we'd already been beaten up by a preschool Kim Possible once today, and we were in no mood to leave that door open to a junior-high-school one."

"Also," Duff says, "I donnae know if ya looked in a mirror or anything, laddie, but you as a twelve-year-old. . . well, let's just say I think it'd be more likely the lassie would bully _you_."

It has the unpalatable ring of truth. Drakken does what he always does when he's too itchy and has no other response - he huffs, "Indeed," and turns his back on his former cohorts.

The police unload them at the Upperton station with bucketfuls of contempt and no degree of recognition. Of course. As of this particular year, Drakken and Killigan have never tangled with Kim Possible, and Monkey Fist hasn't even monkeyfied himself yet.

Drakken stumbles into a holding cell and sinks down, bent-kneed. Every moment he - no, the three of them, which makes it even worse - every moment the three of them spend in the past, the timestream will erode a little further, a flow of water eventually digging out the Grand Canyon. Past Drakken and Past Killigan and Past Monkey Fist are out there somewhere, and the universe's very existence is being bent over double.

Normally, Drakken would relish the thought of such chaos. But there's something to be said for not sinking the ship while you're still on it, right?

And where did he set the Juvinator down, anyway? He spent a whole three days working on it, and it could be handy. Use it to transform them into people too young for them to keep locked up. . .

But, no, he must have left it back at the mansion, and now that eccentric billionaire with the disturbing collection of stuffed animals will probably auction it off on eBay. Presuming eBay exists yet.

"We're doomed," Drakken murmurs. "Doomed to rot in jail. Doomed to watch the timestream rip apart -"

"Doomed to relive the '90s," Killigan says. He squints between the bars at a calender on the opposite wall. "Ya know, I think the finale of _Big House, Bigger Family_ is supposed to air this weekend. Ach, I've got to relearn how to program a VCR!"

"I'll help you," Drakken offers. "I have a great working knowledge of archaic instruments."

Because it sounds better than, _I can't afford a DVD player yet._

"Oh, would ya? That'd be lovely," Killigan says.

"Honestly." Monkey Fist runs a gray-metal gaze over Drakken and Killigan, his eyebrows - as furry as the rest of him, but smooth and compact as if he pats them into place every morning - hanging down low. "I don't know why I expect anything better from either of you."

Shego would already have a thousand comebacks poised to lash his face with. But Drakken's tongue is also dry, empty of words, unless you count concoctions such as _wumbulous_ and _nastlizer_. The only way he can weaponize it is to stick it out at Monkey Fist.

The neat eyebrows spring up. "You know, it was your sidekick who got us into this mess," Monkey Fist says. He turns to Killigan with shrewder eyes, eyes that seek an alliance.

"Exactly," Duff says. "You should learn to control her better."

Drakken is outraged, and he's not sure on whose behalf. He stands up, plants his hands on his hips, and glares down at the both of them. "GGGGK! Would you stop being so - _wumbulous_?" he snaps.

Monkey Fist and Duff don't even play by the rules and answer him. Instead, they pass a look back and forth between them, a look that implies Drakken has Juvinated himself and now stands there as a child in the presence of their maturity.

_Curse them._

Also - why is the wall itself growing a pimple?

That's truly how it appears, a blackhead with angry red blooming out from the sides, and then it opens up and spits out Shego. Duff Killigan immediately begins to growl like a rabid raccoon, while Monkey Fist simply lies down on the single cot provided and lets out a breath so long and showy Drakken worries it might be his last.

Drakken, on the other hand, is up on his toes, light and life spreading through his body. Shego! He knew she wouldn't abandon him for long!

"Well, come on, losers," Shego says, jerking her head at the snarling Duff and the inert Monkey Fist and what Drakken knows is his own gawking self. "You want out of jail or not?"

She barely bothers to put a question mark on the end. Drakken doesn't bother to answer her. He runs up to her, debates hugging her, decides against it, and skips his way through the portal and out on the other side.

He's just noticed the sky is green and furious when something knocks him - hard - in the back.


	18. A Sitch in Time - Future

**~Cross-referenced with the most recent chapter of Assorted Ficlets. Next chapter will be happier, I promise!~**

18._ Watch out for the sidekicks. It's always the quiet ones. Although, come to think of it, the buffoon isn't really all that quiet. And neither is Shego . . ._

By the time Drakken's body scuds to a halt on the far end of the palace, he's no longer sure he's still inside it.

There are hard, heavy thumps as the stone mini-statues of Shego bounce off the impenetrable planes of his bared chest, but they register only as an odd, muted awareness rather than something he can _feel_. Drakken crash-stops and lies there, a mountainous lump that no one can clean up, and he can only wait for the pain to come. Charge every meaty slab and chiseled valley of the body he was so proud of. Rake its way into his perfect midsection and hold him there until his respiratory system gives out.

And he waits and he waits and he waits. But it never comes. It's as if he has chopped down an enormous tree and now doesn't hear it crashing to the forest floor, as if he tossed a lit match on a gasoline-soaked rag and now doesn't see it explode into flames. Not to mention it hinders Drakken's ability to assess the damages to his pumped-up form.

His wrist is broken. Drakken knows that much. The hand has been wrenched so far back that it nearly dangles upside-down, his fingertips brushing his arm, right below where its bulk begins to bloom. Moving it is out of the question. Rubble from those mini-statues - Drakken believes they're called _busts_, but who cares right now? - pin all four limbs into the floor, anyway. Even his eyelids are unliftable, hot-glued shut, burning.

Since when does that buffoonish child have superstrength? _Any_ kind of strength for that matter? A person does not develop powers on the basis of how desperately they need them. If that were the case, Dr. Drakken would have surpassed Superman a long time ago.

Drakken groans. All because he told Shego to gloat to her defeated nemesis - _their_ defeated nemesis. Considering how many genetic supplements she's been giving him for the past five years, he should be strong enough to push himself to his knees, even with just one wrist at operating capacity. But he's shaking, smashed up, anticipating pain that doesn't come, grateful that it doesn't come, and also horrified that it doesn't come. Pain is good when a person is hauled out of a blinding blizzard and into someplace with central heating. Numbness means frostbite, skin discolored further, toes dropping off. . .

_Blast it, now I'm cold._

Below him, the palace floor is cold. Around him, the stone pieces once in the shape of Shego's face are colder. And the air from above is the coldest of all, and Drakken is cold, down to the very crux of his being. Shego always keeps the temperature set nice and low inside the palace - she was his smart little protege, after all.

Drakken tries a swallow that never makes it past his Adam's apple, which seems to be expanding. He imagines a Jacuzzi, a nice Jacuzzi alleviating the stress in his sixty-year-old joints, imagines the safety and warmth that comes with being in a position of absolute power. The safety and warmth he would have given Shego himself, if she would have just believed in his plot and actually _helped_ it a little bit longer.

Still no pain. Of course, maybe it is so natural now that it doesn't merit notice. Pain has been Drakken's constant, unwelcome companion for the past twenty years, so it's entirely conceivable that they may have learned to coexist. He walks around, jittering priceless vases in their stands with his footsteps, feeling exactly like the diagram of exposed muscles in his anatomy books, his skin nothing more than a too-tight formality.

Yet, despite how familiar it is, Drakken has never grown accustomed to pain. Never learned how to stuff down the screams instead of releasing them when Shego activates his obedience collar. Never learned how to keep it from pouring out in his voice when he speaks to Shego - his best friend, his sidekick, his betrayer, his Supreme One.

_Come on, Drakken. Stand up, you big baby,_ Shego hisses in his mind. Or is she standing behind him right now, remote in hand, finger poised on the button that will turn him into a lightning rod?

Drakken's sticky eyelids fly open in panic and immediately latch onto the gruesome mess that's been made of his wrist. It serves as a nice illustration to his defeat. The Supreme One made him an infallible bodyguard, and here he has still managed to. . . fall. Fail. He's a failure.

The world's singular buffest, handsomest failure, but a failure nonetheless.

So cold. As admittedly great as he looks bare-chested these days, he wishes he had his shirt back.

And then there's a burst of heat, eerie heat, heavy and exotic, like diamonds dragged up from down deep by the earth's core. It reaches forward in waves from the back wall, and Drakken is certain he has felt it before at some point before all this treachery began.

"You fool!" a monkey screeches from somewhere. "You broke the Time Monkey!"

High voices, teenage voices, speak other sentences, that Drakken can't make out over the whirring that blows the heat his direction. He still can't lift himself, either, but his legs are no longer jiggling sideways against the ground, and his wrist doesn't feel as grievously crooked.

Shego makes the sound of a wounded bobcat and a grunt that can only mean she's propelled herself into the air. "No way!" she cries.

There's a solid whack, and Kim says, "Way."

A green-and-black blur plummets from overhead. Drakken would stand up and rush for her, broken bones and all, except he's too busy deflating.

Really. As he lies there, cold from the collar down, his muscles fold back into themselves, slowly at first, and then slackening and shrinking faster and faster. His left arm, the one with the bad wrist, putters from the size of a tree trunk down its former lankiness in three blinks' time, and relaxes so thoroughly Drakken expects it to let off steam.

It's a monumental relief, a release, like the world's longest and largest burp. The XXXXXXXL pants Shego issued him now sag, and he could easily crawl right out of them if he wanted to.

The heat comes closer, and Drakken rests his head back on the floor.

The Time Monkey. They broke the Time Monkey.

* * *

"Kimmie's like me." Shego shakes a sneer into place. "On steroids."

Drakken's view of the world fractures into shards. He falls down and down until he can fall no further, arms and legs tucked beneath him like a shell-less turtle's, suddenly sure that he can feel sharp fingers probing him in search of a vein. And he can't let them find it. He can't, can't, can't!

"Dr. D?" Shego says above him. "What the heck?"

"Don't say that!" Drakken blurts, his edges blurring as if someone has spilled solvent on him. His mind flashes backward and forward with images he never put in there, images of needles about to plunge into him and empty themselves into his bloodstream. The sensation of tissue inflating to the bursting point is right there inside him, even though he's never experienced it before in his life.

Shego's response is something along the lines of, "Okay, okay. Geez."

She doesn't understand. How could she when even Drakken himself doesn't? There were a few times when he would have loved to be bigger - okay, a few more than a few times - but he never considered steroids, let alone tried them. They have never had a place in his life.

And Drakken, for reasons still unknown to him, quickly vows that they never shall. A warm wave of near-sickness washes up the back of his neck as though to remind him of something, though Drakken couldn't begin to tell you what.


	19. A Very Possible Christmas

**~Something short and sweet to get the Sitch-in-Time aftertaste out of our mouths. I'm gonna try to get back to my reviewers this weekend. Thanks for your patience, everyone. :)~  
**

_19\. Even evil can break for a holiday every now and again._

Drakken sighs with contentment, the kind of sigh that can only come from wiggling one's toes in the new fluffy slippers one has just unwrapped from one's henchman Bill. He folds his arms across the front of his well-used blue bathrobe that reminds him of old carpet, rubbed-down but still warm. In front of his Thinking Chair, the henchmen step over piles of tissue paper, gift tags stuck to the fronts of their jumpsuits.

If this is how it worked for that Nebuchadnezzar Scrooge guy or whatever his name was, no wonder he changed so radically. Christmas with a family can do that.

Well, not a _complete_ family. Mother isn't coming over until later, and Shego isn't here at all. She's flown back to the sunny shores of Golden Beaches resort - another name he isn't positive of - to spend the rest of her Christmas vacation, and Drakken is glad of it. Otherwise, his Christmas present to her would have ended after an hour or two, and that would be hideously unfair considering he scraped all of his spare money together to let him know he appreciates her even if he forgets to show it sometimes. Her snide comments wouldn't have fit in well with this band of merry-makers anyway, Drakken thinks.

The henchmen, may they live long and prosper, have even found some gifts for Drakken himself. That's a little embarrassing in light of the fact that he has nothing for them. See, he'd planned to be world ruler by now, and he was sure he could have pooled the nations' wealth toward a mass order of "My Boss Took Over The World, And All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt" shirts.

Of course - not that he'd admit it - but Drakken's kind of glad that the Drak Force One scheme didn't work out. Even amidst the loss of a good spaceship and a noble teddy bear, he found something greater - companionship. The likes of which he can't remember having had _ever_.

Oh, sure, around midnight, Stoppable and the Possibles had to break up the party and get home in time for Santa to fill their stockings. But that was after several mugs of hot chocolate that washed the taste of garbage-chute-chicken right out of his mouth and at least nine rounds of Charades, seven of which he won. There was no need for maniacal laughter or fingers poking straight up in threat.

"Adieu, Kim Possible," Drakken said, with a gentlemanly bow. "Until we meet again."

The girl smiled at him, a real smile that shimmered across her eyes as if they were two green ornaments, and turned to walk away. For the first time, Drakken observed her departure with something other than the smugness of escaping with his weapon of choice or the anguish of watching her stride to the door of a lair she left in ruin. It was like slipping into a lab coat he's never worn before and finding someone has tailored it to perfectly fit his - eh-heh - slightly asymmetrical proportions.

Soft. Comfortable.

Drakken frowns at the thought and shakes his ponytail. What was that supposed to mean? Softness and comfort are not what he is working toward. He is on a quest for power, nothing more, nothing less. It's the subjugation of his enemies and the devotion of the masses that he craves, as every villain worth their weight in doom rays does.

Still, it's kind of nice not to have to worry about any of this today. If his scheme had worked - which, of course, it would have if not for the interference of that Stoppable child - he would have spent his Christmas taking calls from surrendering world leaders and signing documents until his fingers were frozen into ink-stained cramps. Lovely things that he can't wait to do, really. . . but there are many, many other days in the year ripe to become The One. Christmas is special.

Soft and comfortable the outfit may be, but he will slip out of it as soon as the New Year's countdown hits zero. When evil comes as naturally to one as it does it to Dr. Drakken, one can afford to take a few days off.


	20. Hidden Talent

_20\. Watch her. Watch Kim Possible. At. Every. Second._

"You can call her from jail," Kim Possible said before she tied them up.

_No, I can't!_ Drakken thinks furiously as he curves his backbone away from Shego's. Hers is so taut and furious that he expects it to burst into flames any second. _Who can call their_ mother _from jail?_

The conversation would be a lie from the second she asked, "Where are you?" and Drakken's used to at least being able to be truthful with _that_. How could he concentrate on making the rest of his story believable when he was crammed into a booth too small to vote in, holding a prison-filthy phone to his ear, trying not to listen to the uncouth chatter of the men on either side of him who looked like they crushed metal for a living - with their bare hands?

No, Kim Possible doesn't know what she's talking about.

Even if she can survive the world's most foolproof death trap. Drakken demanded to know how she had escaped, and she said, "What part of 'She can do anything' do you _not_ understand?"

That is not. An. Answer!

Worse still, she leaned down and ruffled his hair as if he were a mischievous little animal. Drakken glared up at her and hoped with all his heart he would see hate smeared across her face as she looked back at him. But the tilt of her lips told him she didn't even regard him as an opponent on that level.

A soldier scoops Drakken and Shego up in dump-truck fashion and hefts them into the back of a paddy wagon as if they can't weigh more than a pair of hummingbirds. Ordinarily, Drakken would thrash and crash and be the fiercest hummingbird on the planet. One wrong move, though, and Kim Possible will probably glitch through the door and fire a laser from her forehead and whatever other superhuman thing she needs to do to thwart him.

"It was foolproof!" Drakken wails again as the door clangs shut on them.

"Yeah, well, foolproof isn't the same thing as Kimmy-proof." Shego serves up a side order of sympathy with her disgust. That should soothe on its way over, but it only makes it harder to choke down. Drakken doesn't want her to feel sorry for him. He wants her to brag to everyone about knowing him.

Drakken turns to her, as much as he can with the rope tying them together. "How could it have been any better, Shego? How? I had her in a _box_ at the bottom of a bottomle - really, really deep cavern - filled with _water_, with man-eating _sharks_ and a giant _squid_ in that water, which was also topped with six inches of _ice_! I could have gotten rid of Houdini himself that way!"

"Except Houdini's already dead," Shego points out.

"Yes, and from a punch to the appendix, but that's not important now!" Drakken roars over her. "The point is - how did she escape? _How_?" Tears begin to crack through, and he strains to hold them back.

"Dunno." Drakken feels Shego's shrug against his spine. "But I think next time - you're gonna have to actually stand there and _watch_ her go."

Drakken's stomach gurgles as if it is being offered cod liver oil. "Watch . . . it happen?" The very words he spent all evening crowing from his visual presentation onward duck out, refuse to show themselves.

"Mmm-hmm." He can imagine Shego twitching something wry, something both light-hearted and hardened, his way. "That's the only way you'll know for sure that she's toast."

"I didn't want her to be toast! I wanted her to be frozen shark bait!" Drakken snaps back. It's the only thing to say.

There's a pause, which means Shego is ascending toward the pinnacle of all sarcasm. So Drakken is surprised by how genuine she sounds when she says, "What's the big deal, Doc? You wanna see her dead, don't you?"

_Yes, but_ after _the fact._

Somehow, Drakken gets the sense _that_'s not an acceptable answer, either.

It still won't leave his poor buzzing brain alone, even after the paddy wagon has bumped to a stop in front of the Middleton police station, and a soldier has grabbed Drakken's upper arm, thumb and index finger almost touching. Kim Possible has been his single biggest obstacle - well, the most frequent, if not the largest - to total global domination for well over a year now, and not since the day they met has she offered him a modicum of the respect he's due. Of _course_ he wants her dead! It's not even up for debate.

Not really.

But just because he wants her dead doesn't mean he has a deep desire to stand there while her demise plays in a slideshow in front of him. That's so. . . tasteless.

Yes, that's it. Tasteless. It is in absolutely no way related to those nightmares he had for weeks after seeing _Jaws_ for the first time in college. Dreams of other people being eaten by sharks no longer qualify as nightmares, anyway. Not for an evil genius.

Drakken jerks his shoulders forward and is rewarded with a sound poke from behind. He sets his jaw. Kim Possible is going to be vanquished as soon as, well, possible. If he has to stand there and keep tabs, he will stand there and keep tabs. He will be tough. He will be inventive. He will find. A. Way.

If only she could just _disappear_. . .


	21. Go Team Go

**~Hey, I wanted to say sorry, guys. I've really fallen down on the job. Not writing - proofreading. So I've got a whole backlog of stuff waiting to be looked over and posted. Here goes!~  
**

_21\. Shego is not going soft. Shego is NOT GOING SOFT!_

At the last minute, Drakken wrenches the robot's controls away from Shego so _he_ can be the one to clank-whoosh it perfectly down onto the landing pad next to the lair's rear entrance. For the first time in hours, his pride is smarting, having evaporated earlier in the day when Kim Possible showed up and yanked his front door off, glowing blue and accompanied by circus freaks and demanding Shego come with her. Pain prickles at his fingertips, which are surely ruddy-purple and raw from hanging onto the robot's blaster-foot for dear life, but he sticks the landing anyway.

Drakken pauses and turns to study his sidekick - every pale, smooth aspect of her. Whatever he saw in her before, she's buried it beneath a rockslide of studied indifference. When the robot's visor opens, Shego hops to the ground soundlessly.

"Night, Doc," she says, as if she _didn't_ just throw him out of his own robot, as if she_ didn't_ meet up with her (presumably long-estranged) brothers today, as if _nothing_ out of the ordinary has happened at all. Then she walks away, her hair rippling behind her in an obedient mass.

Drakken watches her confident saunter and wonders at which stage in her mysterious childhood she acquired it, or was she born with it? And was she born green? Or did that only happen after she gained her powers? The yearning in his brain, the knowledge-gap desperate to be filled, demands answers.

It is then that Drakken notices she is headed _into_ the lair, not away from it, in the direction of her own living quarters. "Aren't you going home, Shego?" Drakken says.

Shego snaps around in the back doorway and shoots him a look sharp enough that Drakken feels pinned down like a preserved butterfly. "_What_?" she says. What does the word mean to her, he wonders, that it would make her so angry to hear?

"Home," Drakken repeats, gulping. "I mean, to your apartment. Where you usually sleep."

"Nah. It's been a day. They've had construction going across the street for two weeks, and I've gotta get some halfway-decent sleep or I'll be useless tomorrow."

_You could never be useless, Shego._ An internal barricade pops up, the one that all-too-frequently prevents Drakken's words from crossing over into the realm of the spoken.

"Which means," Shego continues, "I don't want to be woken up in the middle of the night with an explosion or a 'Look, Shego, I split the quark!' or whatever."

She considers him capable of splitting the quark? Drakken is certain that his chest is expanding. "May I wake you in the case of a fire?" he says.

"There won't be fires."

Gnnh. He had two slots open, _yes_ and _no_, and in typical Shego fashion she has refused to slide into either of them. "What are you saying?" he says.

"I'm saying, put off playing with paint thinner for _one night_, okay?" Shego's tone wads up the scientific method, spits on it, and shoves it at him.

The back of Drakken's neck comes alive with quills like an irate porcupine. No, make that a hedgehog, because Drakken's can't dislodge and drive into anyone who comes closer - he can only wrap them around himself, hoping and praying no one will be able to break through. "Playing with paint thinner, _indeed_!" he huffs. "Do you know what a valuable commodity liquid mercury is to the scientific community?"

"No," Shego says chirpily, her own admission of ignorance not bedeviling her in the slightest. She flashes him a saccharine smile. Fake as AstroTurf, Drakken knows, but for a moment it allows him a glimpse of just how _young_ she is, under all that cold marble she wears.

He feels tight across the torso, as if his seat belt has left a welt jerking him back into place. "Do your brothers know you kind of live here yet?" Drakken blurts.

Drakken can almost see the liquid mercury seething inside Shego. "Well, any halfway-intelligent person would have figured it out," she says. "So who knows? Maybe they did, too."

Though the disdain is no comfort to Drakken, it doesn't bristle him up the way it usually does. "I - um - they won't try to come _get_ you, will they?" he asks.

"Trust me, Dr. D." There is nothing marshmallow-y about Shego's voice. More like toothpicky - thin but still fully equipped to skewer you. "If that band of losers came after me, _they'd_ be the ones who'd need your concern, all right?"

She stares at him, a pinch to her forehead, with everything beneath lying level. This is Shego's _I'm-not-kidding_ face. The one that usually comes right before plasma bursts from her hands. Drakken has already encountered her ire once today - he has no intention of triggering it again.

"All right," he mumbles around the tightness. "If you say so." It would be the perfect moment for a partners-in-crime grin, the special kind Drakken shares only with her, yet his is glitchy and won't load.

Nothing from Shego. She shrugs, her lip in a decimal of its usual curl, and strides away again, still as straight as a fireplace poker. There is nothing about her that suggests a little girl in need of protection, but he saw it somehow, at some point - he _saw_ it.

Drakken melts back against the wall and folds his arms. In his mind, he can see Shego's halfhearted - no, closer to quarter-hearted - grab for the falling staff. The lack of plasmatic interference - if "plasmatic" is a word - as it slipped between her fingers. The way she watched her fellow superhumans from her seat in the robot until they faded from sight. No matter how many robots she hurls him out of (and Drakken sincerely hopes that count will remain at one), she can't deny that there is something in her that wouldn't let her finish off her own brothers.

Would she have thrown one of _them_ out of the robot?

The thought hurts so much that Drakken sends it flying before it can cripple him. All along, he thought _he_ was Shego's family. Besides his mother, his own family had never been much to write home about - or write home _to_ \- so he chose Shego and the henchmen as supplements, like vitamin pills. And he liked to think Shego has chosen _him_, too.

_Well, you're the one she's with right now, aren't you?_ whispers a narrow offshoot of Drakken's ego.

He puffs up, just a touch, though he keeps his eyes on the floor. There are other things to think about - an ingenious plot Kim Possible foiled by _accident_, which is surely worth sulking over - but all Drakken can picture right now is the pointy, hazardous terrain of his sidekick's face. Now that he stops and ponders it, it's almost as invincible as Drakken's ego itself and sometimes their appearances overlap.

_Two entirely different nuclear reactions,_ Drakken muses. Still, if they're both from the same catalyst - simple science says they are related.


	22. Blush

_22\. Big take-away lesson is to immunize yourself from whatever you plan to coat your nemesis with._

The BO spray is akin to your pores secreting rancid mustard, and Drakken's only consolation is that Kim Possible didn't manage to spray the Embarrassment Potion back at him as well. He'd be in the netherspace by now if she had.

The scent takes him back to one place and one place only - a boys' junior-high-school locker room. Where a scrawny specimen of a Lipsky lurks in a shower stall shoving his feet into his gym shorts in tandem to lessen the changing time, the chances that the lock will crack and reveal him to still be in his Spider-Man boxers.

Beneath Drakken's shoulders, the ground's cold soaks through, as if his lab coat doesn't exist at all. Maybe it doesn't. Maybe he really truly is back in the locker room, trapped in a circle of smelly boys. Drakken can almost hear someone comment on Drew's protruding bones right before kicking them -

_I've got to get out of here! Got to get out, got to get out . . ._

Drakken wriggles and squirms in his patented Mother-escape movement. It doesn't get him very far, however, with the hovercraft upside-down on top of him. Another whiff of himself, and he comes up choking.

Huge heavy feet pound across the grass. Drakken doesn't have to lift his head to know they belong to the Embarrassment Ninjas. They clearly no longer care to collect their pay, which is fine with Drakken because he no longer cares to pay them. _So there!_

Still another plan has backfired. Literally this time. One shift of the wind, and he is once again a victim of his own genius.

Drakken twists himself over onto his back. His arms are long enough to snag onto the hovercraft's underbelly - no, wait, that makes him think of "the soft white underbelly of the teenage ego" - whatever - onto its bottom-side, and he hangs there, panting. Now all he has to do is what Shego does: scooch his behind back a few inches and swing himself up and over.

In theory.

In reality, though Drakken does a marvelous job with the scooching, as soon as he pulls back to swing, he feels a seam pop.

Not in his clothes. In his actual back. One minute he has assumed the position, and the next fire alarms race up and down his spinal column. His hold on the underside of the hovercraft almost liquifies as he lets out the manliest yelp he can.

It's Shego who once again flawlessly executes the flip, not smacking anything in the process, reaching a hand down to Drakken while still in midair. He grabs it and is tugged into a hobbling half-stand. Shego, however, balances most of her weight on one leg, the other held straight out in front of her, prepared to kick. Envy pierces Drakken like a nettle. Dizzy as he is from the stench of putrefying sweat, he can barely balance on _both_ legs. . .

And then he sees why Shego is primed for battle. Kim Possible is checking behind her, and her eyes have lit on them. Her body is now fully restored, right down to that stupid little exposed belly button, and she flashes them a boastful smile that should belong to Drakken, it should, it _should_. Without even a blink, she continues to stroll alongside the boy with the sun-toasted hair. She even turns her head away - she was down to just a head - they were so close - they were so _close_!

For a moment, Drakken's knees quiver with relief. She's not coming after them. There will be no cell for him tonight. No musty, cobwebbed, Shego-less surroundings that by all accounts he should be hard enough to endure. No waking up tomorrow morning to the lukewarm road-paste the Middleton jail severs in the guise of oatmeal.

Only after several more seconds does it hit Drakken that Kim Possible doesn't think enough of them to come after them. They don't even register on her villain-radar.

"Well, this stinks!" Drakken cries.

Shego slides him a slit-eyed look, and Drakken realizes he has just made the absolute worst conceivable pun.

"It does, though!" Drakken says, defensiveness rising up the popped seam in his spine. "We were _this_ close, Shego!" He holds his thumb and index finger at a distance so small it disappears with a squint. "And somehow - somehow - I don't know how - I was one of only about three people in the world who even knew about that poison, let alone the antidote!"

"And the other two were probably her dad and her tech geek," Shego says. "It wasn't a half-bad idea." It's the nicest thing she's said to him all week, and she must realize it too, because she hastens to add, "'Course, I gave it to you."

"Oh, _no_, you don't!" Drakken wags his finger in her direction. "Embarrassment may have been your idea, but _I_ did all the brainwork! The extraction, the potion, the part where I sprayed her with it. . . that was all me."

Shego grunts, which Drakken decides to take as agreement. "I take it Thing 1 and Thing 2 aren't coming back?"

"I take it you mean the Embarrassment Ninjas," Drakken says, keeping his voice as droll as hers.

"Yeah, I'm never saying that name."

Shego hisses through her teeth and glances down at herself in unveiled disgust. It occurs to Drakken that he has never been able to detect an odor from her before, and now the stench comes off her in olfactory neon. No wonder she looks like a cat who just got dunked in a swimming pool.

Drakken sinks onto the nearest park bench and squeezes his palms up to his eyes, watery from the overdose of stink. Beneath them, he feels his worked-over nostrils begin to drip. "No," he says. "They're not coming back."

Fat lot of good they did him anyway - loaning him those binoculars that stained his eye-bags a sickly, rashy color, forgetting to check the wind's direction before launching the BO spray, running off into the darkness while the fumes exploded over Drakken and Shego. They were in his employ, and so Drakken would expect them to have a little respect! Well, not _respect_ exactly - Shego is in his employ too, after all. But at least not active sabotage of his plans.

"There's nothing I can do!" The words nearly blister Drakken's lips on their way out. Still, they're true. Kim Possible and her toasty-haired boyfriend have disappeared, probably back at the Possible house by now, and if Drakken tries to go after them, they'll smell him coming from a mile away. "Nothing I can do but go home and take a shower."

Shego fans the air. "Take six or seven while you're at it."

Drakken squints at her until she flickers in his vision. "How do you know it isn't _you_ you're smelling?" he growls back.

Shego's fanning hand stays in midair, but her fingers hunch down, ready to slash at the starry sky. "Plasma says it's you."

"Yes, it's definitely me, then!" Drakken says immediately. "I don't argue with plasma." First of all, it's an elemental force that by definition cannot be reasoned with. Second, he has seen it obliterate hunks of stainless steel in one concussive blast. How many times has he wished to watch it do the same to Kim Possible?

Which reminds him. . . Kim Possible.

"She didn't even bother to come after us!" Drakken says. The indignity of it all connects with him like a fist, and it's all he can do not to shriek into the night.

"And that's a bad thing? Look, at least she's not gonna give you another flying Kung Fu wedgie tonight."

Drakken feels his cheeks ignite like a pair of match heads. Uggh, _Shego_, why? Why does the phrase "soft white underbelly of the teenage ego" provoke "Eww"s from her, yet she has no trouble throwing around the word "wedgie"? In mixed company, at that? He will take over the world seven times before he figures this woman out.

"So - we're done here, then." Shego pretends to check a wristwatch she doesn't actually wear, unless it's invisible, in which case it can't even be checked. "See you tomorrow, chief."

Drakken knows he perks up somewhat then; he loves it when she calls him that. He can almost feel it lengthening his grasp until the distance between him and planetary domination is immeasurably small. So he nods her off duty like any other stern-but-benevolent boss would do and then turns away. Even if she is taking all of her mockery with her, Drakken doesn't want to watch her leave. Only once he hears crickets and frogs and nothing else does he make an about-face and head for the hovercraft.

The ride back to the lair is unmercifully long, and the reek of himself keeps the image of the locker room vivid in Drakken's memory. He can barely work the steering gears as he smells his own twelve-year-old armpits, wedged up next to him by the tight fit of the gym locker that Carl Thompson is even now snapping shut. . .

When he finally gets back to his lair, Drakken scrambles into the bathroom and hops into the shower without even bothering to get undressed first. Why not? His clothes reek, too. And he's already been naked in his mind for the last two hours - he can't handle being _actually_ naked right now.

Drakken frowns so deeply he can feel the strain as he drives shampoo into his scalp. They were so close to getting rid of Kim Possible! So close to her. . . to her. . . Errr, gee, what _would_ happen to her once her head vanished? Would she be killed? Transferred to another dimension, never to be seen again?

Oh, who cares? The point was, she would have vanished from his life, and everything would have gotten at least eighty-four percent easier. She would have been defeated at the hands of Dr. Drakken and Shego. . . well, mostly the hands of Dr. Drakken this time. It was his brainchild, his concoction, that had shoved her to the very precipice of existence.

Which made it an even _more_ perfect scenario! Drakken would be the one to have destroyed her with science. Brute force has a time and a place - usually the very last bracket of frustration - and yet there is something fitting in Kim Possible's end being a calculated case of chemical warfare . . . Why, it comes straight from Drakken's loveliest, blackest dreams!

There's a certain snug net that comes from going with your strengths. While the most important thing is ending Kim Possible, how much more delicious it would be to bring her down with purely brain, no brawn. It would certainly show her mindless devotees a thing or two. That they've been idolizing the wrong person.

She was a head - they'd turned her into nothing more than a _head_ \- and she _still_ didn't consider them dangerous enough to chase after them? Maybe she should have just quit when she was a head - which was a very clever play on words, though Drakken can't find anything funny right now.

The water spraying Drakken turns suddenly cold, and he turns it off. Hopping out of the shower, he hustles into the nearest towel, wraps its edges around his edges, and shivers into it. Falling droplets puddle around his still-booted feet.

When Drakken glances at himself in the mirror, he is wet and humiliatingly disheveled. With soaked fabric pressing against his body, he looks like a flannelgraph version of himself. Something tamed and toned down for the kiddies to play with, like those teddy bears of Darth Vader he saw once.

Drakken stands there and drips as he waits for the water heater to finish its job, then hops straight back into the shower. He literally rinses and repeats the pattern for the rest of the evening, stops only when his pipes - well, the lair's pipes - begin to complain. By that point, the stink has faded from a packed-to-the-brim locker room to the faint odor of cooking sauerkraut that he smelled at Dementor's lair that day last month when he went to retrieve his sidekick after Dementor had done his best to trick her into working for Dementor, instead. . .

Bad memories. Bad memories everywhere.

The only place to take them is into the lab.

Killer bees. He's thinking killer bees, wondering if he could get some smuggled in from Africa - that's where they live, right? - without maxing out his credit card. Or how hard it would be to get some regular old bumblebees and mutate them himself?

Drakken doodles and scribbles late into the night, finally passing out, saturated with the stench of dashed hopes, over a drawing of a bee with a stinger as long as a screwdriver.


	23. Partners

_23\. Do not **ever** allow yourself to be distracted from your mission by something as insignificant as a flutter. Not even from the world's kindest, softest woman, with the best cookies and the best lab. . ._

Drakken can barely stand to look at his own reflection.

It's not a pretty sight under the best of circumstances - dashingly villainous, yes; pretty, no. And this early morning, he doesn't even reach that far. His eyes, even more heavily underscored with black than usual, are puffed into slits and zigzagged with crimson. It's a harsher tint than even the inflamed skin around his nose. His hair-spikes, which normally fly in seven bewildered directions, look as if they've been plowed over by a street sweeper and left to die.

Any passing stranger would have assumed he was either terminally ill or on some illegal variety of drug. And maybe, Drakken thinks, those would be preferable to the truth - that he spent most of last night crying. Heartsick.

Urgh. Such a strange expression, _heartsick_. Sounds like it should mean plaque is clogging your arteries, or that you've experienced chest pain after eating a bowl of chili too fast. Not that a woman came up to you and reawakened the part of you that remembered how to love, remembered how to give, and that she then strolled away and left you marooned.

(_Rowed_ away - that would fit the analogy better, Drakken decides.)

The few minutes of sleep he did manage to grab last night did nothing for him. He was visited by unfamiliar dreams, not the usual guests of machines turning against him or Kim Possible transforming into a werewolf and swallowing him whole. No, in this one, a little angel was hovering around him, her wings meeting her halo meeting the haircut that framed her face in two ragged box tops. She laughed and invited Drakken to chase her, and scattered warmth along the path leading up to her. He let go of everything and jogged after her, faster in his dream than he could be in reality.

When at last he caught up with the angel, Drakken looked down and discovered himself to be nothing more than a skeleton. His clothes, flesh, and organs must have been dropped along the way. The angel laughed, and Drakken discovered she had fangs. He jerked around just in time to see the world that might not have been as irredeemable as he'd thought disappear in a puff of smoke, and then a giant furry monkey paw smashed down on him to end it all.

Luckily, "it all" included the dream.

Drakken slaps at his cheeks a few times with a damp washcloth, but his sick heart isn't in it. When he hears a knock on the front door, he happily abandons the bathroom and runs to yank the door open for Shego, even though she has a key. There is just a certainty that comes from seeing her - from recognizing that _yes_, this is his friend and _yes_, she will know what to do and _yes_, she will make it better. Combine that with the fact that she couldn't be less like DNAmy if she were a wild dragon herself, and she will brighten his outlook considerably.

"Morning, Doc," Shego says as she steps in. Her eyes are somewhat softer than usual this morning - toughened leather rather than sheer stone. "Hi, how ya doing?"

To his horror, Drakken feels his own eyes fill up. And not with anger, either.

"Still not over your Lady Love, huh?" He's seen Shego look sadistic when she grins before, and she doesn't now.

"I just -" Drakken wails into his hands - "I really thought she - and I - and she - and then - and now what and MONKEY FIST!"

"No accounting for taste. I get it. I get it. Geez." Shego swipes a tissue box toward him with her glove-blades. "Look, you can't just stand around here and cry all day."

Actually, Drakken's pretty sure he _can_, and that's what frightens him most.

"Now, if you want to get revenge on her somehow. . ." Shego trails off.

Her words reach toward him like friendly hands. No, not friendly - but cooperative. Drakken leans in closer to catch them. "Do you know whatever happened to our genetic monstrosity, anyway?" he says. Thickly.

"Word is Kimmy zapped it through a portal into another dimension," Shego says. "But -" she holds up a finger before Drakken can even begin to sag - "that portal is her project for the _science fair_ being held _today_. So, what'cha say, Doc?"

The beauty of the moment overwhelms Drakken, and he has to blink several times in a row until he believes himself to be firm and solid enough for the evil that lies ahead. "I'm thinking," he says at last, dropping his voice to a menacing rumble, "that it's been entirely too long since I last crashed a science fair."

***The conclusion to this can be found in the second half of Chapter Eight of _The Princess and the Dragon_.**


	24. Oh Boyz

**~Because how great is it that Drakken made a cameo in this episode? :D~**

_24\. No matter how nice a prison guard is, don't trust him when he says, "This should be a fun break in routine for you guys."_

"Ugh. I'm gonna have a headache for the rest of the day." Shego lifts her cuffed hands in mock surrender. "Cute kid. Can_not_ sing."

Drakken nods, still stricken mute. They have a few minutes left before the guards separate the men and the women again, and he knows he should be hunched over those minutes, guarding them as if they're gold nuggets. But on the whole, he remains frozen in a half-sit against the wall, remembering Junior's bid to "Quit Playing Games With My Head." A song Drakken liked until Junior screeched it across the jailyard, wriggling in his too-tight orange jumpsuit.

Even _that_ wouldn't have been so bad, except every time a particularly romantic line came along, Junior would lean straight into Drakken's personal bubble and smile too brightly. The proximity was enough that Junior breathed mouthwash up Drakken's nostrils every time Drakken tried to jerk away, and enough that eventually Drakken could feel the little curl of hair on Junior's chin tickling him, tickling him from every side, and he couldn't squash it with his hands cuffed.

Yet for the moment, Drakken relishes that Shego has said something disfavorable about Junior. The way she flies off to talk with him at the villain get-togethers - Drakken gets the distinct sensation that he stands alone on porch steps, watching her climb into the truck of a nice boy he hardly knows, a boy who could have swimsuit calendars hidden under his mattress for all Drakken knows, seeing her roll her eyes as he admonishes her to be home by 10:00.

Shego must notice the stiffening of his back - of course, she notices everything - where the phantom chin-curlicue still rubs. "Okay. Wow," she says. "You're looking nice and traumatized. Anything I should be worried about?"

Drakken tilts his head to consider it. Shego worrying is somehow similar to a bloodhound losing a trail. It happens only every now and then, and whatever the weapons the hunters behind her yield, it's not enough to ward off their circling panic.

"I just didn't like how Junior kept. . ." Drakken stops. The words taste poisonous. ". . . flirting with me?"

Shego twitches, the handcuffs stretching. The jumpsuit seems to shrink her and pull the green out of her complexion until she's someone small and white and almost unrecognizable. "Ex_cuse_ me?"

Drakken slides his shoulders back and forth to rid them of the itch. He wants to rid himself of this _conversation_. "You didn't notice all those times he was leaning into me and, I don't know, _smiling_ like that? It was very. . ."

Shego interrupts him. By folding into rare full-blown laughter. "Dr. D! You thought Junior was _flirting_ with you?"

The way she says it, it sounds stupid. Very stupid. As if he's accused Junior of being the _true_ criminal mastermind when the kid has no resources save good oral hygiene. (And Drakken's got that too, anyway.)

Drakken refuses to nod. "Well, wasn't he?"

"No-wah!" The exclamation could come from somebody's twelve-year-old sister. "He was flirting with _me_, doofus."

Drakken's stomach rolls. "Oh, that's even worse!" He scowls. "Makes a lot more sense, but it's worse."

Shego is still squeak-laughing as a female guard comes up and herds her away with the only other villainness - DNAmy. Although calling her a villainess is stretching it, Drakken thinks. She bubbles along beside Shego as if they're the best of friends.

Seeing DNAmy is still like being stabbed in the throat with a pencil. Drakken takes a big swallow and exhales slowly so she won't see his face contort. The guys may flirt with Shego, but as Drakken glances back and forth between the way DNAmy's neck smooths right into her shoulders and the way a person could puncture themselves on Shego's jaw, he knows which one he considers prettier.

The emptiness doesn't last long before Senior sweeps into the room, elegant even in the unflattering jumpsuit and his constant crouch. "Oh, yes, Dr. Drakken. Did you enjoy the performance?" he asks.

Drakken's tongue turns to stone. The honest truth is, _No_. The honest truth is, _Your son sounds like a baby bunny trying to play the bagpipes._ And while Drakken may not be exactly best friends with the honest truth, it's been a long time since he lied in an unselfish way.

But Senior is looking at him with those sharp, warm eyes. Those polite eyes that make you want to match them grace for grace.

Somehow, Drakken moves his stone tongue. Molds the words, "Errr, it was certainly interesting. Your son is a. . . unique talent. Yes, sir, I've never heard anything like it." He bobs his head and tries not to picture Junior tracking Shego down the hall. It's a thought that stirs the true villain at his core, the one that he generally has to search and search to find.

Those eyes twinkle knowingly, as if they have heard everything Drakken has taken pains not to say. Senior smiles - not too wide or too white like his son. "Thank you. You are most kind."

Drakken lets himself beam for a good two minutes before he begins to wonder whether a supervillain should take that as a compliment.


	25. The Truth Hurts

_25\. Kim Possible is like the postal service. Neither sleet nor rain nor snow nor ICE - especially - can keep away. Keep weather-related booby traps to a minimum._

The cold water socks Drakken right in the lungs, freezing his oxygen solid so that it can't fight its way in. Yes, surely that's it. Surely that's what's happening. It can't be that in his momentary fright he's forgotten the respiration process entirely. Anyone with absolutely _anything_ happening upstairs will find its regulation involuntary.

There's an opening somewhere in this ice, right? Yes, of course, there is. Kim Possible skated a hole around Drakken and Shego and that's how they got dumped in here in the first place. This is how he wanted Kim Possible to die back in January, Drakken thinks numbly as his surroundings grow darker and chillier. This is how he wanted her to feel - helpless, flailing, expending all your energy and resourcefulness only to find it isn't enough.

And now here _he_ is, under a layer of ice in his. . . _lair_ of ice.

That clever bit of wordplay gives Drakken just the boost he needs to shoot for the surface. He spreads his legs under him like scissor handles and push-kicks at the water for a head start, elbows crooked, arms chugging through the water. His hand flies up and, at first, feels only ice, ice, ice, ice - the hairs on his arms can't stand up any higher, not with his sleeves choking them - ice, ice, ice, ice - panic in his throat - ice -

At last, Drakken's fingers find air - _glorious_ air! Wrapping them around the broken maw of the ice, he manages to haul his upper body out of the brink and take a few frosty gasps. But when he tries to inch his fingers forward, they skid across the surface like shards of a dropped glass, propelled by the impact, finding no traction to slow them down.

_Curse you, body!_ Drakken thinks fiercely. At least the anger is warm, insulating him against the chill and the fear. _Now is not the time to be weak!_

And suddenly, _he_ is the one being propelled, straight up and out of the hole, by someone's strong, swift thrust to his tailbone. Drakken rolls across the ice, ice he is reluctant to trust with his body weight despite his lack of other options. Coming to a stop on his back, he stares at the icicles on the ceiling and tries to hold perfectly still. At least he can breathe out here, though each breath stabs through him.

A dripping figure clad in green and black digs her glove-blades into the ice and hoists herself out of the hole behind him. Her hair clings to the sides of her head and to the backs of her wrists and all the way down past her waist, flowing like an oil spill. She reminds Drakken of one of those five-pound cats with the ten-pound fur that seems to shrink when dunked in water. He would giggle, except for the fact that this cat still has claws.

(That and the fact that mad geniuses don't _giggle_.)

Of course it's Shego. Of course Shego saved his life yet again.

Someone could always argue that Shego just pushed him out of the water to clear her own path, but Drakken knows the truth. Shego chose to save him.

Just like he chose to save her when Kim Possible came flipping through the air with the blades of her ice skates at a perfect trajectory to come down on Shego's head. Drakken jumped in front of her, fanned out his limbs to block her, and then knocked her down into the snow - that part wasn't exactly in the plan - yet it worked, didn't it? The blades sailed right over the both of them.

Funny thing was, there was no command in his mind that said, _Save Shego_, just as there hadn't been a command to _Save the buffoon_ back at the North Pole on Christmas Eve. Both times Drakken's body simply took over and the adrenaline was, for once, a flood that carried him away with it, rather than a useless pool of standing water that built and swelled like the dickens but never managed to move a thing. It was marvelous.

Drakken gives a soggy nod. The itch in his chest drifts away for a moment.

And then stupid Shego has to open her smart mouth and ruin it all.

"Ladies and gentlemen," she says, as if speaking to a massive audience, "we are gathered here today to mourn the death of _another_ one of Dr. Drakken's 'foolproof' plots. As usual, his theory that Kim Possible would _never_ be able to find him in an ice fortress turned out to be, unfortunately, completely wrong."

"Don't get lippy!" Drakken yells at her. After almost drowning or hypothermia. . . ing. . . he has no tolerance for jokes about funerals. He folds his arms and feels his lower lip pushing forward even farther than it naturally does.

Turns out she's right - not about his theories being wrong, but about the plan being dead. Kim Possible and her intellectually-challenged sidekick have disappeared, and they've taken Dr. Wong with them. That woman must have a spine of steel, right down to the gluteus.

Well, she wouldn't have been able to resist the Truth Ray, would she? Drakken feels no guilt in his stomach over bringing that into play. Good guys are supposed to tell the truth anyway. He was just helping her live up to her own ethical standards.

Shego does not heed his warning. She waves an imaginary microphone at him. "Dr. Drakken, can you tell us just how it feels to be foiled once again by a teenager on her way to first period?"

"How do you _think_ it feels, Shego?" Drakken forgets to stay still. He lunges forward, grabbing at nothing, and his right foot bolts out from under him. Next thing Drakken knows, he sits down on a hard-packed layer of ice. He doesn't _mean_ to cry out, but it sort of gets whacked out of him.

Drakken lifts one boot and glares at it. "These are supposed to be nonslip surfaces!" he fumes.

In spite of the water coursing down her in sheets, Shego's laugh is purely dry. "With you, Dr. D, there's no such _thing_ as a nonslip surface."

Drakken clenches his fists and locks them down close to him. It's the first time he's caught a glimpse of himself since he dropped into the ice. His clothes have been twisted and shoved close to the thin supply of muscle he has to supplement with padded cloth, diminishing him.

"Hey, if it's any consolation," Shego says, "I think you managed to hit Kimmy with the Truth Ray before she took off. Doomed her to a day of total honesty." She gives a noteworthy lift of her eyebrows.

It's as if their roles are reversed - Shego the one to present some delicious wickedness, and Drakken the one to stand there blinking, uncomprehending. "Big deal," Drakken says, getting to his feet and knocking some snow from the seat of his pants. "Kim Possible is always honest anyway. After that one Halloween where she lied and got grounded, at least."

"No, you don't get it." Shego shakes her head, her hair looking fluffier and fuller already. Drakken knows his own must be drying into little loops and corkscrews on his forehead. "Kimmy has to say EVERYthing she's thinking. Even if it hurts somebody's feelings or makes her sound like a dweeb."

Shego curls up a smile, and Drakken feels himself slowly grinning with her. Kim Possible has always considered herself such a diplomat - except with him; she has no regard for _his_ feelings whatsoever - but now she will insult everyone who doesn't live up to her standards. And as overachieving as the snide little girl is, that would all her teachers, fellow cheerleaders, and lunch-table buddies.

Drakken shivers, and his toes make every effort to bury themselves beneath the pads of his feet for added warmth. For a moment, though, he's too pleased to be aware of the sub-freezing temperatures. What better comeuppance for Little Miss Popularity?


	26. Sick Day

_26\. Wash your hands thirty-nine times a day. And take lots of Vitamin C. You can't afford to get sick. The world goes to pottery when you're incapacitated._

The heat of the fever laps over Drakken, pushing back his reasoning like sand. It doesn't help that his sinuses are more congested than a one-lane highway during rush hour. _Why do they call it rush hour when nothing can move an inch?_ Drakken has always wondered this, and nothing moves in his head, either, just piles higher and packs in deeper.

Stretching his nostrils as far apart as his pinkie fingers can get them helps some, but it's quite a chore when you ache all the way down to your fingertips. If he weren't so weak and feverish, he could come climb out of bed and invent some kind of mechanical device to hold his nostrils open _for_ him. Then again, if he weren't so weak and feverish, there would be no need for the device to begin with. Well, he guesses he could always save it for the next cold, be proactive. Plan ahead, the way Shego is always saying he hasn't learned to do.

(Drakken doesn't see how she can claim that. He planned everything before the fact this time and even _illustrated_ it, after all!)

To top it all off, Brock-with-his-brain-in-Felicia's-body proved himself a coward after all. He called off the wedding to Felicia-with-her-brain-in-Brock's-body, leaving her in tears and viewers to gape at a screen that announced the show would be returning with new episodes this _fall_. How is anyone supposed to wait that long, especially poor heartbroken Felicia?

Drakken lifts a box of Kleenex to hurl it at the screen. Instead of flexing, though, the tendons in his arm basically melt, and the Kleenex bounces off the end of his bed and veers onto the floor.

The door opens, and Shego walks in. She appears to be recovering nicely. Her face has regained some of its healthy green color - well, it's healthy for _her_ \- though it looks grim. She must have seen the finale, too.

"Hey, Doc," Shego says. Her voice is still a little stuffed up, which softens it a bit at the edges.

Before Drakken can hack up any greeting in response, Shego is perched on the side of his bed, still graceful and effortless and _fast_ even with the tip of her nose still stained pink. "Yeesh, Doc, drink some more of your orange juice, okay?"

Shego folds Drakken's fingers around a chilled mug of what the teens today refer to as "OJ" and stares him dead in the eye until he takes a sip. It's flavorless, which is awful, but when Drakken swallows, it's a fire extinguisher all the way down his swollen, burning throat. He lets out a moan of relief.

"Okay, so I've got bad news and worse news," Shego says.

A staccato beat begins in Drakken's temples. "What's the bad news?" he croaks.

"Ray X got kinda smashed. Well, totally smashed."

Drakken lies there for a moment, gazing down into the orange liquid swirling in his mug and trying not to watch his plans for world domination get pulled down the drain. A setback. They can live with it. "What's the worse news?" he says.

"Kimmy took it with her."

Fatigue drops on Drakken's shoulders. "Fine," he mumbles. "Let her be the one to have to experience the agony of reconstructing a broken machine this time!"

Shego squints. "You're not upset?"

"Of course I'm upset!" A grunt would give the sentence greater effect, but the mucus buildup simply won't let one through. "We just need a new plan, that's all!" Drakken shoots upward in bed and pokes an introductory finger into the air. "First, we shall have to -"

And then someone is pounding, hard-hard-hard, on his ribcage, with the abrasive side of Shego's nail file, and Drakken can no longer speak. He can only cough and cough and cough, one fist banging his chest in an attempt to do CPR on himself, until he's sure his tongue will fall out. Cough and cough and cough until something wet and greenish finally tears loose and spatters on his pajama cuff, which Drakken remembers to raise just in time.

"Ugh. That's lovely," Shego says.

She sounds about as unenthused as a person possibly can, and Drakken _has_ to make up for it, he _has_ to! He inches across his behemoth of a bedspread and finds himself falling out of bed. No, not falling. . . closer to _dribbling_ out of bed, like molasses out of a keg, one squelching drop at a time.

Drakken braces himself to hit the floor, but he never does. His legs are tangled in his red sheets, a silken knot keeping them in place, while his top half droops off the mattress and wobbles there, hearing clogged up and sight spinning.

"Hey! Stop!" Shego grasps one of Drakken's shoulders and eases him back into the confines of the blankets. "What the heck are you doing?"

"You're ruining everything," Drakken addresses Shego. Tries to address Shego. There are three or four of her, and none of them are staying very still. "I gotta get up -" he thrashes something, something that hurts - "and take over the world. . ."

A sneeze begins right behind Drakken's eyes and tingles there while Shego tightens his blankets around him, taking him captive, and flattens a cold washcloth across his forehead. It feels good against all that molten metal inside, but he can't let it feel good. He must be stronger than this!

"Are. You. Serious." There are no question marks as Shego glares at him. "Dr. D, you need to _rest_. This whole Energizer-Bunny routine can actually _hurt_ your immune system, ya know that?"

Drakken opens his mouth to debate her facts, except the sneeze chooses that moment to erupt all over his jammies. Shego leaps away in the nick of time.

Shego jerks her chin his way as if to say, _I rest my case._ Her smooth fingers pick up the thermometer and slide it between Drakken's chapped lips. Even with his eyelids creeping their way toward each other, Drakken can see the mercury climbing red to the top. He bites back another moan.

"But. . . Shego. . . I've gotta. . ." Mad scientists don't say _gotta_, but he can't remember the real words. . .

"No. You need to rest." Shego shoves her pointy self right into his space. "Seriously. Go to bed. The world will still be here when you wake up." The way her frown curves is almost gentle. "I'm not gonna let anyone else conquer it in your absence, okay?"

Did someone just untie sandbags from his waist and let him float to the surface? Because that's sure what it feels like to Drakken. He falls limp against the pillows, his stubbornness slowly receding. He is provided for. He is allowed to be weak.

He is. . . safe?

"Promise?" he murmurs into his pillowcase.

"Yeah. I promise."

She says it so kindly, Drakken knows he must be dreaming already. Only then does he permit his eyes to shut and his snuffling breathing to slow.

The world will still be here when he wakes up.


	27. Mother's Day

_27\. It's not just Christmas. Never plan a scheme around ANY holiday._

The hovercraft scrapes to an imperfect landing outside his haunted-island lair. No matter how much Drakken jerks the steering gears to the left, the rattling persists, up and down inside him, until he's ready to "rend his garment," as they said in the old times.

His Syntho-plasma is gone. _Gone_, and he had such great plans for it, too! All manners of plans. He could stuff it inside pillows which he could then sell to an unwitting populace. Stick it in jars and market it as an alternative to Play-Doh. Or he could just show up at a world-leader council one day and gum them all to the ground with it. That last one sounded most impressive, but there is sometimes something satisfying about subtlety (whoa, that was a lot of "s"s), especially when you've heard others whisper about you that you wouldn't know it if it crashed on top of you.

(Which, Drakken believes, is the very opposite of subtlety. But he digresses.)

The Syntho-plasma is gone. Yet his mother is alive.

Mother must somehow know he's thinking about her - she always knows - because she reaches out and takes his hands between both of hers, the color and texture of bread dough. Squeezes. Even as instinct propels Drakken away, he cannot argue with his gratitude that she is alive and safe. He would stand for nothing less.

Just. . . couldn't she be alive and safe somewhere _else_? At home, knitting Commodore Puddles a doggy sweater, instead of right here in the middle of everything she wrecked today?

Funny. There was a time, back when he was Drew Lipsky and wore those glasses like Bunsen burners, when his mother's flower-perfumed scent and her squeaky geyser of a voice were what he depended on, what wrapped him in a chrysalis of safety. But now, after years and years in that chrysalis, he is no longer a caterpillar - he is a butterfly, and the membrane is stifling, and he needs to break free and get the heck out of Dodge before she can inspect his spots and realize he is not what she thinks he is. He can picture it, clear as a snapshot, how the love would leave her eyes and turn him into the worst type of orphan - the type whose parents were both still alive.

Drakken swings his achy self out of the hovercraft. Several stomps away, he remembers that his short-legged mother can't climb down on her own, so with a wrench of his back, he returns and grudgingly helps her down, jerking away at the last minute before he can land in her doughy grasp again.

Yes, he forgot it was Mother's Day. Forgot it was May. Heck, he didn't even remember it was Sunday, which is something he can usually keep track of as Day Two Of No Shego. This week, however, with the Syntho-plasma within reach for such a narrow gap of time, Drakken asked her to stay the weekend, and she didn't even complain. . . much. So, no, he had no reason to suspect it was Mother's Day until his mother waltzed into his lair, a sheep into the lion's den, and he just couldn't send her back to that dim, starved-looking dump of a house all alone.

And now the Syntho-plasma is gone.

_At least Kim Possible's gone, too,_ Drakken tries to tell himself. Inside, though, he knows it's probably his most far-fetched lie of the day. It's not that he believes he'd get some kind of telepathic message the moment Kim Possible bites the dust, but it's hard to imagine that his chest could still itch so unceasingly if she were really, well, dust-bitten. No, Kim Possible is still around - it's that kind of day where she'll no doubt emerge from the wreckage of that train with nary a scratch on her. Probably with a movie contract, too.

Drakken chooses exactly the wrong moment to blink. Behind his eyelids he sees Ann, asking her daughter if Drakken was hitting on her, staring sideways at him with equal parts exasperation and pity. Ann, who would have gone to the big dance with him if she hadn't had a grade-changer of a test that weekend. . .

_So what?_ He hasn't seen her since college. She means nothing to him anymore. Even without the accidental injection of permanent blue dye into her melanin, she has probably changed as much as Drakken has. He doesn't even know her last name, for the love of the metric system!

Well. . . now it's Possible. She married into that family of meddlers - strange; he would have thought she'd have better taste than that - and that automatically makes her the enemy.

Still - why couldn't it have been the buffoon and his naked rodent instead?

If Mother weren't here, Drakken could scream. Throw things. Give his henchmen a scare they'll never forget. But in her estimation - her naive, mistaken estimation - he is good.

Drakken clamps his teeth down so hard that the huge breath he takes can hardly sneak past them. Only when a drilling pain begins in his jaw does he release them and let the air shudder out. He slams his way into the lair, leaving the door gaping open behind him for Mother, and stalks down the hallway into his living room.

Mother is there within seconds. "My, that was a wonderful picnic!" She gives her high-pitched, train-whistley sigh, as though all her dreams for the day have come true. "Don't you agree?"

Drakken's chest doesn't itch anymore. It hurts, somewhere on the level of a thumbnail smashed in a car door.

"Yeah," Shego says agreeably. Entirely too agreeably. The hairs on Drakken's neck begin to rise, pulling his shields up with them. "And congrats on passing your jumping test, too."

He didn't get his shields up in time. The pang zips right through them and tunnels to a cold stop just short of Drakken's heart.

Villains aren't supposed to have hearts, but it's basic biological knowledge that nothing can survive without one. Except jellyfish.

He doesn't want to think about it, so of course nothing else will break through - how he watched the train car he just unlatched careen into the gorge, carrying his nemesis with it, a moment worthy of a maniacal laugh if there ever was one. And then Shego said, "What about your mother?"

And then Drakken couldn't see the train anymore, couldn't see the gorge, couldn't see anything as a string of Christmas lights burst in his brain, one bulb at a time.

When Mother says, "Except we didn't get our coffee after all - would you mind if I made some coffee, Drewbie?" he nods and nods and nods, not trusting his speech capacity. Ground-down bits of syllables dance around in his throat, in no hurry to sort themselves into words.

Mother disappears, and Drakken nearly collapses atop his theater-grade television set. Now he can be rotten again.

"So, I've been wondering," Shego says, too close to his ear. "Should we file this failure under 'Kimmy came through' or 'we had to run away from the thing we were stealing'?"

The twitch that has been reclining on her lips all day kicks into gear. Drakken is no longer a butterfly. He is a mouse, caught between her talons, being toyed with before he is devoured.

Drakken jolts away from her with a harsh, "File it however you wish! I don't care what you say - today could have gone worse!"

She snorts.

"It could have! I didn't get my mother k-k -" Drakken tries to tug the word out, but it has octopus tentacles and is entangled around his uvula - "_hurt_, and I didn't reveal to her that I'm a supervillain!"

"Not yet," Shego says.

"What is that supposed to mean?" Drakken is proud of his snap - it clicks with precision and doesn't let a milliliter of fear trickle through.

"The day's not over yet, _Drewbie_."

Drakken hasn't had that pet name lobbed at him like a grenade for decades, but the bullying twist to it is as old and familiar to him as his mother's touch itself. He doesn't remember how he lived with it back then, if he _could_ live with it. He feels his hands shaking furiously at his sides. Lucky for Shego they are, or he would have them around her throat.

Well. . . no, he wouldn't. But it was a nice rotten thought, at least.

A few incomplete noises spit themselves from Drakken's mouth before he can articulate the beginnings of a threat. "Shego, say something like that again, and so help me - "

"What?" Shego pulls her eyes sarcastically wide. "Are you threatening me, Drew Theodore P. Lipsky?"

Ohhhhh, he should have _seen_ that one coming!

Mother returns with the coffee just then. Drakken snuggles his fingers around a mug warmer than anything else in the lair is, including himself, even in springtime, and takes an enormous gulp. His neurons zigzag, each one flashing an image on its way through - algebraic formulas, chemical compounds, doom rays, the bedazzling throne that will be his as future overlord of the world.

Despite the coffee, exhaustion spreads through Drakken. He has spent the whole day smiling at his mother and hoping who he _really_ is doesn't seep out through the cracks. How much longer before Mother adjusts her glasses and sees it?

"Hey, I've got an idea!" Drakken exclaims over the rumbling inside him. "How about we watch _television_? Perfect end to a - a - _wonderful_ day!"

Without risking a glance at Shego - even her nail file joins in her mockery, which is a real feat of engineering if you think about it - Drakken snatches up the remote and flicks the screen to life. A newscaster so handsome he must be made of wax stands before a map of the heat wave Middleton's supposed to get this week. Two seconds later, the camera cuts away from him and lands on a heap of Syntho-plasma.

That's it. He's hallucinating. Deprived of the greatest technology advance of the decade, Drakken's mind is grafting it onto everything within his line of vision.

Except, would he also be superimposing a headline that reads, "Two Generations of Hometown Heroines Prevent Catastrophe"? Over the crumpled remains of a train car and next to the navel-baring teen who stands with her arm around her mother and a look of nauseating modesty on her face?

Drakken drops the remote and clutches his chest until he's sure he'll leave a handprint.

"My goodness!" Mother gasps and points at the screen. "It looks like we got off that train just in time!"

Shego sniffs in such rapid succession, Drakken knows it must be a well-disguised laugh._ What is there to laugh about?_ he wonders. _Kim Possible is still out there somewhere!_

Then again, so is her mother.

"Yes," Drakken says, and the robust sincerity of it surprises even him. If he didn't know better, he'd believe _himself_. "Just in time."

And maybe he isn't entirely lying. Unless Kim Possible suddenly gets smart and decides to focus her energy on passing her SATs, she and Drakken will be fated to meet again someday, un-mother-encumbered. And on that day, Drakken will have even fewer qualms about sending her to her demise.


	28. Ron Millionaire

_28\. Next time you run across somebody else's windfall and pocket it for yourself, buy the items necessary for your evil plan_ before _the. . . uh. . . supplementary ones. (And, no matter what Shego says, there_ will _be a next time!)_

Drakken kicks a board off his belly and coughs from the smoke. He can hardly stand to look around. He knows this scene like the back of his hand - no, _better_, since the backs of his hands are encased in gloves the majority of the time.

Broken glass flung everywhere. Boards fried to a crisp, falling over. The frameworks of once-proud Doomsday devices lifeless in the corner, if they were fortunate enough to still be recognizable.

Operational Catastrophic Doom just blew _itself_ up. In a big way.

_How? Oh, what are the odds that I'm dreaming this?_

Across the room that's no longer there, he sees Shego straighten up and slap at a streak of soot on her cheek. "Colossal. Waste. Of. Money." She lets each word drop with a plink, and her face scrunches as if she just stepped right into a cow patty.

_Probably somewhere in the seventh decimal place._

Drakken stabs a finger in her direction, hoping the anger behind it can somehow reach her and gives her a good shaking. "Shego!" he barks. "No Iceland for you!"

Before she can retort that he doesn't have an Iceland to give her, he stalks away into the rubble, avoiding those eyes - accusatory eyes that sneer that Drakken fooled away all that money every bit as badly as Stoppable.

Which he _didn't_.

Okay, so there _was_ that digital shoehorn. But mostly that was just because the batteries weren't included.

The landscape is flat and brown in every direction, all the way to the edges. Empty as a vacuum. Ordinarily, solitude and bleakness are an evil genius's best friends. That, however, was before Drakken found _new_ friends - kids in too-big basketball jerseys and hats you could make sand castles in, who followed him around and cheered on his every purchase, the more extravagant the better.

Only that was when Kim Possible raided his haunted-island lair, and Drakken had to make a daring escape, and he didn't have time to snatch them up. He didn't even have time to snatch _himself_ up - Shego did that for him, throwing on her jetpack and grabbing his wrist and swooshing the two of them off into the sky, while Drakken's palms grew slipperier than they probably should have. Drakken loves shooting through the air on his own jetpack, but to dangle from someone _else's_ grip, no control over where they went or how, must be how it feels to be a character in a video game, at the mercy of whoever operates the joystick. And even though that person was the most skilled player on Earth, it was still frightening.

So now the atmosphere is empty of adoring cheers, the landscape a bleak void. It matches the feeling within Drakken, the feeling that reminds him of Kim Possible's belly button becoming a vortex. He is now alone - alone with Shego, his henchmen, and the ruins of Operation Catastrophie Doom! which was never meant to be ruined at all.

Everything inside Drakken wants to collapse in the middle and wail. But he must be made of sterner stuff than that. Like that diamond.

Yes, the diamond. He'll think about its physical properties until he comes back together again. Hardest substance on Earth. Ten on the hardness scale. Too hard to leave an identifying streak on the streak test, which isn't much of a problem because even a twit like Kim Possible's best friend knows a diamond when he sees one. Only thing hard enough to scratch it is another diamond.

_Like Kim Possible and Shego,_ Drakken thinks, a bit of ruefulness peeking through his anger. They are the only ones sharp enough to scratch each other. That must be why so many things get broken when they fight. . .

And deep, deep, _deep_ down, Drakken is afraid he's no more than a nine-and-a-half on the hardness scale.

The ruefulness disappears, hurled away by a swirl of rage. Drakken growls out loud, grabs a half-blackened board that has come to rest on his feet, and sends it flying toward that stupid moon that refused to cooperate with him. He's not actually expecting the board to hit the moon and knock its orbit off - it'd be destroyed tearing through the atmosphere, anyway - but he's also not expecting it to flip a meager five inches away. Which is exactly what it does, landing with a dry _thwap_, leather against fence posts.

_Gnnnngggk!_

Drakken pictures the diamond again, sitting at a fit finally perfect inside the laser's powering compartment. He remembers turning smugly to the buffoon and nodding in its direction. "Pretty bling-bling, huh?" he said.

His lip recoiling, the boy shook his head. "No. Not anymore. Not now that you've said that."

The boy is not a _complete_ twit. He at least recognizes he is unworthy to use the same terminology as the legendary Dr. Drakken!

It's then that Drakken notices he has permitted his body to slouch, too close to the ground. He can feel Shego's eyes stamping disapproval on his back, as if there is something uneven to the hang of his arms.

Well, how is a person _supposed_ to stand after gaining and losing a massive fortune in the span of forty-eight hours? One minute Drakken was online shopping, and he was able to hit the shopping cart icon over and over and over again, without ever second-guessing himself, and his pulse was banging on his temples from the inside, only it didn't hurt at all. Surrounding him were a crowd of friends, urging him onward.

Then he was flying through the air like a video-game character, and then he was paying for a makeshift lair and more Doomsday devices, and then he was waiting for the sun to go down and the moon to appear so that he could set Operation Catastrophic Doom! into action. The henchmen watched the sunset, appreciated it, but Drakken was bouncing on his heels, begging the sun to disappear _faster-faster-faster._ There would be plenty of sunsets to appreciate once he ruled the world.

And then, the next thing he knew, he's right back here again. He still has vertigo from the clicking and hoping and exploding.

Of course, if he had bought the necessary equipment first and things had still gone bad, he still might have had another cool nine, ten mil to fix it up with. (That's what teenagers say when they mean "nine or ten million dollars" - well, what they will _stop_ saying now that Dr. Drakken has appropriated their language.) If he hadn't bought the digital shoehorn and the person-sized hamster ball and the tropical-fruit peeler. . .

Ruined. Now he'll have to return to his old miserly ways, and where's the fun in that?

So how _is_ a person supposed to remain upright?

Drakken steals a glance back at Shego just for some ideas.

She's uprighter than he is, he supposes, though her head is thrown so far back her hair nearly grazes the sand. On her face, Drakken thinks he can read both disgust that she will not profit from his scheme and victory, a tiny little trace of victory, that she was right about its fail - its success-impairment. Drakken frowns. It seems to him those should be two mutually exclusive events, like rain and no-rain. (It can rain and be sunny at the same time, though a lot of people don't know that. But it can't simultaneously rain and _not_ rain.)

For a moment, Drakken thinks of a plot he saw on TV once. A star football player making wagers against his own team and then purposefully losing the games so that he and he alone was the winner.

The thought crunches Drakken in its grip like a boa constrictor. He shakes it away, guilt hot in his ears. No, Shego is no traitor, and how could he think otherwise?! If she _wanted_ Operation Catastrophic Doom! to fail, all she had to do was not lend him the cool two mil in the first place.

No, Shego would not betray him any more than he would betray her.

Which leads him back to the problem. How _did_ his plan. . . not work? It can't be that his calculations are off. He checked them at least five times each. Besides, there's no way to verify it now. Logbooks are the first things to go up in flames. Handy way of disposing of evidence. And Drakken knows, he _knows_ that he understands the formulas for velocity and trajectory and the exact trigonometric angle he positioned both mirrors on the moon.

Unless - unless Kim Possible went up there and tweaked those angles, just enough to thwart him!

Of course. That _must_ be it, Drakken decides, kicking at a pile of scorched metal. If that child can jet off to Brazil - on a school night, no less! - it's really not that far-fetched to think she could somehow fly to the moon. Especially considering her loving father is a rocket scientist.

_Oooh! How am I supposed to beat someone so unfairly advantaged?_

Drakken takes another peek at Shego. Her pale green skin is draped over a hard mask of barely-there amusement now. Drakken momentarily believes that Shego has grown so accustomed to losing, grown so devoid of hope, that she can only derive pleasure from picking apart Drakken's plans herself and laughing up her sleeve when they fail, because it is her only method of triumphing. And momentarily, he feels very, very sad for her.

But then her words tramp downward, heavier than her footfalls - _Colossal. Waste. Of. Money_. - and grind his sympathy into the dust. Drakken is left seething, armpits soaked with frustration. If only there were some way to chemically convert frustration into superhuman strength -

Ooh, what a lovely idea! Drakken rubs his chin to keep the mental stimulation alive. Perhaps that will be his next scheme, as soon as the police clear away from his old lair. . .


	29. Rewriting History

**~Wishing you all a very Merry Christmas and a happy holiday season!~**

29._ Keep work life and home life separate. At least when work life consists of mutations._

"We'll never speak of it again!" Drakken blurts out, and then he shoots up to a sit, in what he recognizes as his bed, fingers clinging to his teddy bear, Sir Fuzzymuffin the Second.

A quick, frantic glance around the room reveals nothing but darkness. Silence. Cold moonlight up against the blackout shades of his windows.

_Oh. It was a dream._

That's odd. Normally Drakken doesn't feel such - such _neutrality_ toward the realization that everything he's been through in the past four hours has been a bodily-sanctioned hallucination. Typically, his reaction is either highly negative (when the dream involves him conquering the world or winning three thousand dollars in a bake-off) or highly positive (when the dream involves Shego leaving to work for Dementor or something happening to Mother). Strange.

Yes, _strange_ is definitely the operative word here. The dream starts to come back in patches, the way the first stubble begins to sprout on your head after you've charred yourself bald again.

He was standing in his mother's attic - it felt so real, he could almost smell the must and feel the cobwebs against him - listening to a recording so old it wasn't even on a cassette player. It was on one of those old-fashioned phonograph machines, the kind Thomas Edison invented. The deep rumble on the recording claimed to belong to a man named Barthlomew Lipsky, who had stolen a static-generating device and was planning to use it to take over the world.

A shivery feeling, also unusual for this early summer, slips up Drakken's arms, and he clutches Sir Fuzzymuffin tighter. He doesn't remember ever hearing about a Bartholomew Lipsky. Of course, he's never been close to his father's side of the family, unless you count Cousin Eddy and _his_ parents, and even them he hasn't spoken to in decades. Richard Lipsky was a branch Drakken pruned off a long time ago.

(Or tried to, at least.)

But an ancestor who _also_ wanted to take over the world? Drakken is sure that's a detail that would never have gotten shuffled to the back of his brain. Would look pretty good on the ol' evil resume, even though Drakken's fairly certain there is no hereditary component to supervillainy as there is with dimples or the ability to roll your tongue. The general population of ignoramuses might _not_ know it, however.

And then Drakken dream-remembers saying to Shego, "And that, Shego, is why I became a villain!"

Shego stared at him. "I thought you became a villain because of those guys who teased you back in nerd school."

_Yes. So did I._

Drakken dream-sees himself wave her off, as if he is a new comic book writer doing an indescribably poor job of retconning a character's backstory. So - in this dream, he didn't turn evil because of the Bebes and the big dance? It was something that had been there since he was a child?

He doesn't know if his subconscious is complimenting or insulting him.

Perhaps it would be better if it were true. Maybe it was better for the whole villainous PR gig to have genetic tendency rather than a vulnerable background. Maybe there's such a thing as bad blood, after all.

(Has to be from Richard's side of the family, though. Because Mother is a saint.)

Drakken shakes his head. No, he is reading too much into this. A dream is a dream, and even Sigmund Fraser or whoever that guy was had never been able to figure them completely out.

The dream ended with the electro-static generator blowing up Drakken's hovercraft, as Kim Possible yanked him and Shego away just in the nick of time. Saving their lives. They sat there in awkwardness, watching her smirk, and then he awakened.

Seemed so _real_, though.

Drakken starts to lower Sir Fuzzymuffin back to the covers, and then he gasps and smashes the bear against the top button of his pajamas again. A sound is coming from down the hall, a scuttle-clunk sound, like a dog dragging a bum leg.

Oh, bother - has Commodore Puddles gone and peed on another piece of dangerous machinery? He's been getting so much better about not doing that lately. . .

Closer and closer creep the clunks, and then there is the creaky sound of a door opening, but without the accompanying metallic unlatching of the knob. That sound cuts off abruptly into the sound of. . . chewing?

Drakken's lungs grab all the air they can reach, and he leans over the end of the bed and peers down at whatever has scuttled in.

_Ohhh, sweet Mother Theresa!_

It's a termite the size of a Chihuahua, very small for a dog, very big for a termite. Its antennae are also turned around backward, and from its mouth jut two yellow fangs - neon yellow, not didn't-brush-well-enough yellow. In between them crunches a chunk of Drakken's bedroom door.

For several seconds, Drakken is immobilized, all but his own mouth, which rips out a scream of, "GAAAAHHHH!" When at last feeling returns to his toes, he leaps up on the mattress, tucks Sir Fuzzymuffin under his arm, and bolts down the hallway, stopping to grab the phone along the way, calling for Commodore Puddles the whole time. Poor puppy is more than happy to give up on his snarling match with the identical, glowing termite in the kitchen and slink off after Drakken.

As soon as the lair's door - metal, not wood - slams shut behind him, Drakken picks up the phone and punches his number-one speed dial. Fear pools in the back of his throat.

"Yeah?" comes from the other end of the phone. Even late-night-groggy, Shego's voice sounds as if she's stuck it in a pencil sharpener.

"Shego! We have termites!" Drakken cries.

There's a reproachful silence, followed by "You woke me up - _at three in the morning_ \- to tell me we've got -"

"Mutant termites!" Drakken interrupts her before her sass can fully awaken. "Giant mutant termites with glowing fangs!"

"Fantastic. We'll take care of them at a decent hour, 'kay? Go to bed."

"Go to bed with those _things_ in the house?" Drakken can hear himself nearly screeching, but he doesn't care. She must be out of her gourd! (How does one get _in_ a gourd, anyway?)

"They eat wood, not flesh."

"The mutant ones?" Drakken swallows hard. "Do we know the mutant ones don't eat flesh?"

"How about this?" Shego says after another long, fierce silence. "If one of them tries to eat you, then you can call me back. Otherwise, I will see you _after_ the sun comes up."

Dial tone.

Drakken can't bring himself to go back to the lair, and that turns out to be moot, anyway, because the door has locked behind him. He grunts as loudly as he can and sinks to the narrow stretch of beach between his lair's borders and the sea. Imagines the outgoing tide is fleeing from the dreaded Dr. Drakken. His mind, still sore from the dream, begins to grumble almost audibly.

Grumbling passes the time too slowly, which is just one more thing to grumble about. Mother would tell him to count his blessings.

Well - it's not freezing cold outside. Or raining. And there are no pretty female neighbors to see him outside in his jammies, like there are on every sitcom ever.

_That's about all I've got for blessings._

At long last, the sun begins to rise, and Drakken finally cracks something related to a smile. The henchmen like sunrises, and at this moment he can see why. Yellow and orange slowly light up the horizon with promises about the day's goodness that Drakken always wants to believe. It's a gentle usurpation on the sun's part, the stars not stabbed out but laid to rest until evening.

_I could do that to you, Kim Possible,_ Drakken thinks with unexpected gentleness. _I could do that, if you would just be smart enough to stop bothering me!_

The sunrise brings with it Shego. She lands her helicopter and strolls toward him with casual grace. Shego can be careless and never so much as rip her jumpsuit. If Drakken gets careless, mutant termites storm the premises.

How is that fair?

"Good morning." Shego gives even those pleasant words a sarcastic ring. She nods toward the door. "They in there?"

Drakken nods, too, his head flapping up and down, overly mobile in terror. He wonders why that is. . .

Shego kicks the door open and sticks her upper half into the lair. Twenty seconds later, she's back, saying, "I think I found the problem."

"Already?" Drakken creeps closer - not too close.

"Uh-huh." There's a tearing noise, and Shego's hand returns to her side, holding a good-sized slab of metal. On it is scrawled, _Bug Mutator 3.5!_

Drakken recognizes his own Sharpeed handwriting. Considers denying it. Finally just fixes his biggest, toothiest grin and most innocent eyes. "Yes, well, I, um. . . wasn't planning on that happening."

"Okaaaaaythen." Shego shoves her wrist back like she's planning on flinging the Bug Mutator 3.5 straight into his grin, and Drakken ducks before realizing she never let go. "Just - humor me, then. What was _supposed_ to happen?"

"Wasps," Drakken says with another, harder swallow. "I was going to mutate wasps."

"Wasps," Shego repeats, deadly quiet.

"Wasps," Drakken confirms. "I discovered a nice little nest on the rear entrance a little while ago, and I knew if I could harness their already painful powers - "

"You were going to _mutate_ a nest of _wasps_? Here?" Shego's fingers flex. "And I didn't know?"

Drakken can't keep looking at her. Her hunched posture, her tensed-up muscles are too darn frightening. "I got the idea over the weekend, and when nothing happened by Monday, I must have forgotten to tell you. Sorry," he adds in a peep.

A peep. Like a baby chick. This is embarrassing, especially in his jammies and bunny slippers.

"Mutate wasps," Shego says yet again, as if she is having trouble grasping the concept. "And how did that end well for us in your mind?"

"I harnessed them and used them against my enemies!" Drakken rears back for a chortle, but Shego's finger jabbing in midair stops him. "They would obey me," he reassures her. "I'd be their creator!"

"Right. Because that worked so well for Frankenstein."

Curse that girl and her never-ending supply of jabs. Just. . . curse her.

Shego plucks the phone from Drakken's fingers as if she's extracting a splinter. "I guess I'll just have to call an exterminator." She wears _that_ expression - the one she always wears before she lunges for Kim Possible's jugular.

Drakken's own jugular feels like it's already been crushed. He backs away from her and her scary glove-blades, shaking his head over and over again. She can't. She can't! "No, no, no, now, Shego! I know I goofed up - it was very rash and thoughtless of me, I admit that! But surely, there's another way we can work this out - "

"For. The. Termites."

"Ohhhhhhh." Drakken balances against the side of the lair to keep from dissolving into a puddle of relief at her feet. "Yes, that sounds. . . wise."

The phone crashes back into his hands. "Yep. I'll go get the phone book. _You_ get to be the one to explain our predicament to Mr. Bug-B-Gone or whoever." Shego cuts a look at him that he would be a fool not to comply with and plunges without so much as a yip into the Land of Mutant Termites.

She sure is brave. _Of course,_ Drakken thinks, _if I had her virtually unlimited powers, I'd be brave, too._

At least, he hopes so.

Well, sure he would! He wasn't the least bit deterred by the thought of mutant wasps. But Shego would say that just makes him crazy. He's a "chicken" when he's scared and an "idiot" if he isn't.

Drakken sighs and lets his shoulders drop for the first time since the termite ate its way into his bedroom. He doesn't understand her terminology or her standards. _His_ need to be imposed, and the sooner the better, if the world wants to have a prayer of making sense at all.

For a second, Drakken almost wishes he could ask Bartholomew Lipsky for advice, but considering the man never took over the world himself - Drakken _definitely_ would have remembered _that_ \- he would be about as helpful as Spider-Man. No, less so, because Bartholomew would be dead in addition to being fictional.

And Drakken doesn't need _anyone_ with the Lipsky surname to win the world _for_ him.


	30. Steal Wheels

**~Happy New Year, all! I'm sorry I haven't had the chance to be more active over the holiday season - I'll try to get caught up sometime this next week. Hope you enjoy!~**

_30\. NEVER involve family._

Something is wrong inside Dr. Drakken, and he can't figure out what it is. It's too far up to be a cardiac incident, too far down to be a migraine, and too far below the surface to be a skin rash. No, this is more like someone has phased inside him, grabbed his soul, and turned it inside-out.

Which is ridiculous, Drakken knows. The soul is not a physical organ, not of the variety that can potentially be damaged in a crash. And scientists have yet to perfect the art of phasing inside matter. Maybe that's something Drakken can work on for his next scheme, now that the Doom-Vee lies crushed and lifeless in an alley somewhere. . .

He should feel good, he knows. Well, in an evil way. He finally stood up to his mother.

Drakken _still_ doesn't see why it's such a big deal, but when the arresting officer told Mother that her son and nephew had stolen a wheelchair, she nearly swooned onto the pavement. "There must be some mistake, officer!" she cried, tearing at the policeman's sleeve. "My Drewbie wouldn't hurt a fly!"

Those should have been exactly the words Drakken wanted to hear. He has always wanted to be good in her sight, and right now she was his best chance of not being taken downtown and fingerprinted. Yet he could almost feel himself shrinking down to the bespectacled fifth-grader whose mother burst in the classroom door, yelling, "You forgot your lunch!" and made him squirm inside his too-big jeans. Mother didn't even like him wearing jeans to begin with - dress slacks were always her first choice - but they were expensive, and Eddy's hand-me-down jeans (the ones that survived for Eddy to outgrow, that is) were free.

Mother straightened up, and even though she's a foot-and-then-some shorter than Eddy, she bore down on him like the Wrath of God. "It's Eddy's fault! He's a bad influence! Just look at his hair!"

That was when Drakken's heart sealed shut like a spaceship hatch. He'd grown used to the feel of his hair skimming his shoulders over the past several hours. It doesn't scratch at the back of his neck any longer, just flies free. Even the way the ends don't all line up seems a liberation to him.

He leaned in and told his domineering, clueless, wonderful mother that it was called a _mullet_, whipped his own back and forth, and then, at Eddy's behest, played a mean chord on his air guitar.

There was a screech - which at the time Drakken assumed to be a bat, but which he is now realizing probably came from Mother. He didn't care either way. For the first time in a long time, he knew exactly who he was. He was one of the evil Lipsky cousins. He was a man who pilfered wheelchairs from children when the necessity arose. He was a man who aimed lasers at self-styled teenage heroines without a second thought.

(He was a man who was still shaking from being whiplashed by his seat belt as Kim Possible crunched the Doom-Vee into a brick wall over and over, until it collapsed into glass shards and leather scraps and broken dreams. But nobody else needed to know that.)

Another police officer is crouched in front of Mother, advising her to calm down. Mother doesn't look calm at all. Drakken turns away so her clenched fists and upset face will not be his own undoing.

The paddy wagon door clinks shut then, and Eddy turns to face Drakken. Drakken half-expects to see sheepdog-drool hanging from his cousin's grin. "You totally rock, cuz," Eddy says.

Drakken feels those words light up the reward center in his brain, a section that gets very little nourishment. "Seriously?" he asks.

"Seriously." That is the Eddy-version of a solemn oath.

Two more doors, the front ones, slam shut, and Drakken frowns. He always imagined that he'd be in the driver's seat, both metaphorically and literally, by the close of this day. Never mind that he doesn't have an official license - he'd award himself one as ruler of the entire world!

The paddy wagon rolls forward, and Drakken lurches sideways. The criminal-containment unit in the back doesn't start thrashing around the way the Doom-Vee did, but Drakken still sticks out his hands and grabs onto the padded bench for support.

It is there, twisted and wishing for lumbar support, that he glances out the mouse-ear window straight ahead. The height _should_ make it so Drakken can hear Mother but not see her, but that's the opposite of what's actually happening. She's hopped up onto a nearby crate so she can get right into the officer's face and give him what-for, a what-for too high-pitched for Drakken to even hear. Mother's hair, fever-pink, wavers up and down as the officer talks to her - about Drakken, surely - and Drakken doesn't for one moment believe it to be in agreement. She's weeping, he knows.

The hatch inside bursts open again. Drakken lets his gaze travel down the length of his lab coat, to make sure the pants below them aren't sprawled around his ankles. Even if they were, the coat itself would shield his - _ahem_ \- undergarments from view. But there would still be that stripped-wire feeling that threatens to short-circuit him.

And to think this all started with Mother depositing Eddy on his doorstep and telling Drakken to take good care of him. As soon as she was gone, Drakken had muttered that he would, indeed,_ take care of Eddy_ and activated his security system, complete with spiked clubs and whirring blades.

He wasn't planning on killing Eddy. Not that he didn't consider it - spewing crude come-ons to Shego should certainly be a capital offense - but something else insisted on immunity for the man who helped Drakken learn to ride a two-wheeler back in the day. All that mattered was that as long as Eddy _thought_ Drakken would kill him, Drakken had the proverbial upper hand.

Drakken sinks into a sit on the bench and blinks hard. His eyes are over-lubricating themselves, and they're really thwarting their own plans, because every new drop of water feels like it's being stuck in with thumbtacks. Kind of defeats the purpose of having tear ducts in the first place, doesn't it?

It had been Eddy's idea to steal that one boy's wheelchair and use it to "trick out" the Doom-Vee, "trick out" being a term that Drakken has run across in his research into teenage slang but never would have thought to use. He was happy to abandon his own catchphrase - which would have been "kick it up a notch," gleaned from that one celebrity chef on the Celebrity Chef Channel - and adopt Eddy's instead. It was Eddy who stupidly forgot to mention that the wheelchair could be remote-controlled, who didn't think to snatch the remote control during the wheelchair-heist.

It has to be Eddy's fault that Mother is crying. Drakken _needs_ it to be Eddy's fault, needs it the way a body needs vitamin C.

With inadequate warning, Drakken springs a leak - of tears, of saliva, of horrible whimpery sounds - and he can't find the valve to turn them back off again. He brings his hands up and plasters them over the soggy calamity. The darkness behind them is painful and stifling, but he can't do anything except plunge deeper and deeper into it.

He remembers how Shego looked when she caught wind of the plan to steal the wheelchair. Her tensed-up face didn't call Drakken a moron. It called him something worse, something evil, only most things regarding evil were high praise coming from Shego.

This wasn't, not by a long shot. It almost reminded him of Kim Possible, standing up there in Self-Righteousville, where she will never have to leave because everything she wants will always be hand-delivered to her. It went back and forth from Eddy to him and judged them to be the same, even though Eddy had actually grabbed Shego and tried to force his lips to hers, which Drakken would never have done unless she was in dire need of CPR.

For a fleeting, vicious second, he wonders if he _should_ have killed Eddy.

A disk wiped as soon as it is inserted. Murderers bring even more shame on their mothers than wheelchair thieves.

"Hey, cuz."

"What?!" Drakken crabs back. He lowers his hands gingerly, but the furthest thing from anger looks back at him as Eddy sits on the other bench across from him, his meaty shoulders spanning its width with ease. Drakken's more aware than ever of the narrow binding of his own as they quiver with regret.

(Regrets are different than remorse, right?)

"What's wrong?" Eddy says.

_What's wrong is that I've been thinking about killing you, and you're just still worried about me!_ A cold blast of sleet comes over Drakken's arms, and he pulls them in, drapes them over each other, cursing the awkwardly long, thin bits that still poke out. He turns away, but no matter where his focus lands, he sees the same things - Eddy's approval, Mother's disapproval, Shego staring at him from a moral high ground she doesn't even like.

"You got nothin' to cry about," Eddy says, in a tone that wouldn't know how to scoff if it wanted to. "You were cool with your mom."

The thought of his mother - looking at her, listening to her - ties Drakken into a stiff knot. It nauseates him to picture her gazing at him with her gushy, blind affection, but watching it empty out of her eyes is a terror he doesn't have words for. Possibly they don't _make_ words for it.

"Yes, I suppose I was, wasn't I?" Drakken says. It's his first sentence all weekend that doesn't end in an exclamation point. His inside-out soul isn't in it.

The paddy wagon turns a corner. Drakken goes cracking against the wall, and - _oh, no, ghhh, no!_ \- he sees the Doom-Vee interior, everything being broken and shredded all around him. When he blinks, it's gone, but he still can't loosen his knuckle-burning grip on the bench.

Eddy stands beside him, holds him up. His wide palm secretes sweat, the warm, hard-work kind, as opposed to the cold terror Drakken can feel under his own gloves - which makes no sense, because he worked every bit as diligently as Eddy today. Drakken shivers away from him, the surprisingly kind cousin who has turned out to be the best company he's had in a good long while. Certainly the most fun.

The cousin who Drakken knows he would never survive another team-up with.

"So, I been thinkin'," Eddy says. "Wanna be cellies?"

Cellies? All Drakken can think of are Kim Possible and her insipid little friends discussing their cell phones. "Huh?" he blurts.

"Cellmates," Eddy says, great patience in his voice. "You know, the Lipsky men gotta stick together, right?"

"Really?" Drakken peers narrowly at his cousin. He can feel the red rims forming around his eyes, swelling them into livid specters of their usual roundness.

Eddy nods. It seems an odd time for Drakken to notice this, but he does - Eddy has the same cheekbones as Drakken, the ones handed down to both of them from their fathers, the ones so sharp you could carve a roast with them. Of course, Eddy's are better balanced with the sturdiness of the rest of his face, but there's something to be said for the unsettling contrast of Drakken's, especially with the scar zigzagging under the left one, proclaiming that here was a man who wasn't afraid to get down and dirty if it meant he could rise to absolute power.

A tiny bit of warmth burrows its way back to Drakken's fingertips and dribbles right back out again when he remembers his last cellmate, a slick-goateed convict with about fifty hulking pounds on Drakken. Who could terminate Dr. Drakken's Patented Death Sneer with a simple, wordless, stormy stare and seemed to enjoy pressing Drakken against the bars and flexing his finger muscles as he held him there. Drakken can still remember the man's breath, hot and scented with coffee and cigarettes, fanning across his face and practically condensing on Drakken's clammy skin.

"Yes," Drakken says as soon as he can smell the memory. "I want to be cellies. However -"

He stops and swallows hard. Eddy studies him with those dark Lipsky eyes, gorged on mischief, and it makes it so much harder to add his stipulation.

But if he keeps hanging around with Eddy, Mother will get suspicious. And Shego will up and quit on him, and his chances for world domination will follow her out the door.

"Shego will be coming to break us out soon," Drakken hedges. The second he says it, he longs to take it back, because he sees the way Eddy lights up at the mention of her. He's seen it before, so many times. With Shego, lovelorn glances become lustlorn glances unbearably quickly. His most recent image of her, glimpsing off trash cans and shooting up a fire escape to safety with her hair all puffed out and disheveled in that way she can't stand, churns his stomach with a very different kind of desire. The kind to protect her from people like - well, people like Eddy. Yes, she has her plasma and her martial arts expertise, but it could still be improved with a - a - a -

_Mullet-proof vest_ is what occurs to Drakken, and he has to suppress a giggle. Such a sound coming from a mad scientist renowned for his maniacal chortling is an endangered species that would certain endanger him if unleashed in public. It only takes one un-sinister noise, one less-than-villainous event, to fall out of favor with the crowd that frequents HenchCo.

So Drakken takes a long drag of air and lets it boom back out as he says, with all the frost he can muster and even a dollop that he can't, "And when she _does_ break us out, I think we should go our separate ways!"

"Okay." Eddy shrugs, amiable as ever. He reaches out and claps Drakken on the back, almost denting Drakken in a place where he can't afford any additional dents.

Drakken's throat quite unexpectedly pulls tight, but he still rotates his body away from Eddy's. For the sake of his mother and Shego - no, for the sake of himself and his dream of global conquest - he has to part ways with his cousin, return to his haunted-island lair, and discover how to phase through objects.

His hands excavate his pockets. Sure enough, his special blue hairband still waits, fallen to the bottom as if it was afraid he would never return for it. Drakken loops it back around his hair - a symbolic, dramatic movement - and ow, it stings when it pops into place.

The lining of his pocket is flipped inside-out, too, and Drakken wishes it were as easy to punch the lining of his soul back into place.

**~And the build-up to So the Drama begins...~**


	31. Emotion Sickness

_31\. Before you activate technological bombs on Kim Possible, always, always, ALWAYS make sure she is wearing the only copy of said bomb. If you don't, other people can get hurt, people you don't want to get hurt. Like you._

It's 7:30 in the morning, and Drakken is lying in bed, trying to determine what hurts worse - the plasma burn on his arm, or the black eye on his. . . well, that name is self-explanatory.

The plasma burn's hurt is sharper, more immediate, all the damage concentrated in one purplish blob. The black eye's hurt is deeper, burrowing far, far beneath the surface, through all his layers of skin and into his tendons. A third degree bruise, if you will.

Both thanks to Shego.

Okay, no, it's not quite fair to blame her. It wasn't her fault. She was under the influence of an emotion controller and then locked in an irreversible state of rage. That was no one's fault.

_Well, okay, if you want to get technical, it_ might _have been mine. . ._

How could he have known, though? He heard "Kim Possible" and "emotion controller" in the same sentence, and all other thoughts squirted out of his head like slippery soap bars. Within seconds, Drakken had the Electron Magneto Accelerator hitched to its remote control. What the Moodulator would do when the thing's power reached its zenith, he didn't know and didn't care. Maybe it would blow itself to bits and take his despised nemesis with it. Maybe it would paralyze her. Or maybe it would just shove her down into the pit of her own despair, the way she did to Drakken so many times, only he can shove harder, and she would never, ever emerge again. It all seemed too good to be true.

And it was.

Turned out there was a second Moodulator - and Shego was wearing it. It had only fried up and fallen off when Drakken thought to warn her that no other villain would give her Iceland after they had subjugated the planet.

So her feelings were artificial as she pounded him, and she didn't mean any of the things she said. The real Shego lay in stasis somewhere inside her while this version of Shego went after him with her fists, even though he had taken her to Middleton Days as an evil date just the way she wanted. Maybe, Drakken remembers thinking, she could somehow sense with her mental radar that he didn't want her to kiss him again - that he would rather have poison ivy than kiss her again.

(And that's saying something, because poison ivy is _very_ unpleasant!)

At any rate, she didn't mean it. Now if Drakken were writing the story, he would say that makes his wounds hurt less. But that plasma burn on his arm is screaming as loudly as ever.

The doorbell rings, and Drakken swings himself gratefully out of bed. He never bothered to get out of his lab coat last night, so he will look prepared and presentable in front of Shego, as if he has already gotten dressed for the day. Hee-hee. She doesn't need to know. . .

Drakken opens the door, and he knows his face perks into Automatic Eager Mode before Shego's projection of indifference. Her eyes are at half-mast as usual - droll, not coy, but it still shivers Drakken's gut to see it. He takes a step backward without meaning to.

"Good morning, Shego," he says. Fingertips knocking each other, toes tapping.

"'Morning, Doc." Shego lets her bag thunk to the floor.

Drakken finds himself studying her - not in the manner of a potential beau, but of an archeologist, surprised at the pale youth of his newest discovery. Over the course of its short life, it has grown quite grungy, yet no trained historian would ever mistake it for an antique. Her lips - the ones she paints black, or at least Drakken assumes she paints them. They could be naturally black, for all he knows. Shouldn't they smile every now and then?

Those lips that surprised him with their heaviness against his, like scarves. . .

Another shiver, and another step backward. He saw her smile when she came and sprawled out on his lab table, taking up all the space he needed for his equipment. Drakken has seen her stalking Global Justice agents and scientists like Bortel a thousand times over the years. But this was a brand-new kind of prowl he saw her on as she rested her cheek on her hand and curled the other hand toward him, a hunt where she was somehow both predator and prey, and he was simultaneously afraid for her and afraid of her. He wondered who had taught her to assume that pose, and why, of all the people on this soon-to-be-conquered planet, she was aiming it at _him_.

"Yo, Drakken. Earth to Drakken."

Shego snaps her fingers at him, and Drakken realizes he has been staring. He delivers a wide grin, the kind that always placates Mother and sometimes even works on Shego.

"What are you looking at?" Shego says. "Is my eyeshadow smudged or something?"

Drakken feels the grin drop away. "What's eyeshadow?" He is the one whose eyes are shadowed, with the blackened wax of the candle he admittedly burns at all ends, and now with the bruise Shego has inflicted on one.

Shego grunts. "Forgot who I was talking to."

That's better, familiar. Drakken nods vacantly, glad she isn't trying to - what do the teens today say? "Hit on"? Not trying to "hit on" him again.

He isn't attracted to Shego. She is attractive, of course - Drakken isn't blind, and he's not stupid either, despite what Shego might assert to the contrary. Drakken can see beauty in vintage stamps, too. But he is not a stamp collector, nor is he a. . . a. . . whatever he would be if he were drawn to Shego in that way.

(Drat! If he could just think of a term, that would be the best metaphor ever!)

Drakken's mind flashes with the image of Shego, bundled up in her parka-the-color-of-his-bruise, hair corralled into a ponytail, two mugs steaming in her hands. She looked every bit as jaded and worldly-wise as ever as she set those mugs down and tried to put her fingers all over him. She just also looked jaded, worldly-wise. . . and very, very young. Why, wasn't it just last year that she received her diploma from the online university she'd been attending?

Shego steps around him and now continues into the living room at her usual light tread. Drakken follows, thoughts still bloated. He regrets many things about the past few days - he regrets Amplifying the remote control before hearing all the facts, he regrets letting Shego take him into that photo booth, but most of all he regrets not noticing that she had an emotion controller latched on her the whole time.

Of course, Drakken thinks to himself, it wasn't immediately obvious. Even on her best days, Shego runs hot and cold, same as the stubborn tapwater at his abandoned-warehouse lair. She is fiery when she fights Kim Possible, as if the heat of her plasma has ignited everything on and in her, and she lashes with grace and precision. It's like watching a ballerina attempt to kill a slightly smaller ballerina, which doesn't happen in too many ballets, Drakken figures.

And then she can be cold, frozen to the core, at the times when a villain absolutely needs to be nothing but pure, impenetrable steel. Shego is good at that, better than he is. Dr. Drakken is undoubtedly ruthless, but he _does_ have trouble turning off his enthusiasm, especially the closer he gets to world domination. It is something he admires about her, though he has never told her that. To compliment Shego is to implicitly insult himself, and Shego would waste no time agreeing with him.

So all of that makes sense to Drakken - but then, how does one explain her abrupt refusal to fight Kim Possible in Bortel's lab that day? Suddenly, she was cold when she was supposed to be hot, frustrated with Drakken and for what, exactly? It was like putting a glass of water on a hot stove and watching it freeze instead of boil. It defied reason, defied scientific law.

And Dr. Drakken is very, very unsteady when it comes to things science can't explain.

"Drakken!" Shego snaps from the living room. It zings Drakken straight back to the present.

"Yes?" he calls. He turns the corner into the living room, and his foot comes down in ice water that immediately numbs his ankle. "Yeeouch!"

Shego nods, smirking. She's standing in the ice water, too, unfeeling even as it laps up to the green pouch she wears on one leg. "Exactly. Care to explain this?"

Well, he will never turn down a chance to explain. Drakken tucks a hand behind his back and fastens his smile back into place. "Um. . . well. . . while you were, um, preoccupied with. . . other things, I Amplified the air conditioning and turned the lair into a frozen wasteland! The ice must have - eh-heh - melted."

"Lovely." Shego squints at him like she doesn't remember the parka, the lattes, the offer to - gulp - cuddle. Like none of it ever happened. "Why didn't you clean it up?"

How badly he wants none of it to have ever happened.

On the strength of that wish, Drakken comes back with, "Why didn't _you_?"

"I was on an emotion controller. What's your excuse?"

"That you were on an emotion controller." As soon as the words are out, Drakken adds them to his Regrets List. They were true, but they evinced vulnerability, and he's been vulnerable far too many times already this past week.

Shego makes a noise of disgust and flips her hair away from him. Drakken stares down at his reflection in the standing water, which seems to be sticking his clothes right to the bone, and he checks the condition of his black eye. Has the swelling gone down any?

Though it's hard to tell at a glance, with the always-blackened skin looping his eyes, it still feels like pastry dough. Shego stands in constricted silhouette when he closes his good eye.

This _is_ better, the bickering, and Drakken never thought he would be glad for Shego's sass. With every sarcastic syllable, however, she tucks the lining of his soul back into place.

Pretty soon it is right-side-out again.

Mostly.


	32. Bad Boy

_32\. Never trust HenchCo technology, even in a free demonstration. Steal it - err, outsource it - and bring it back to your lair, so you can work on it on your OWN terms! If that freckled nuisance didn't get in the way, the world be yours. . ._

"Kim Possible!" Drakken hollers. "You think you're all that -"

His unbearably hip catchphrase cuts off to a strangled gasp as the explosion rings through the lair. Drakken thrusts himself at the floor - or maybe that is the shock of the explosion, throwing him down. In either case, he stays there, hands tight around his head, teeth gritted and stinging, and waits for the entire Alpine range to collapse around him.

When it doesn't, when the floor stops vibrating under him, Drakken lowers his hands, stretches his neck, looks around. Kim Possible, the buffoonish child, and their mole rat have disappeared. For the first time ever, Drakken feels her absence like an orifice, like a mutant third ear he has no idea what to do with.

She's flown the coop. And the clouds above him remain gray, but a pale, metallic gray, not the ponderous gray that would indicate they were armed with tornado conditions. Which can only mean -

"The Mega-Weather Generator!" Drakken cries. He starts to leap to his feet but hits an invisible force field instead - or it could be his own dizziness, which feels like a thousand doorbells going off at once between his temples.

Sure enough, the Mega-Weather Generator is crushed, destroyed, its parts strewn across the floor in mechanical carnage. Even though Drakken is only its surrogate inventor, the loss pricks his heart.

Drakken turns, pawing at the floor, frantically searching through the smoke before it hits him what he's searching for.

The Attitudinator.

And it's gone. Kim Possible must have taken it with her, not trusting it in his hands. Which means he can never again be -

Drakken yanks off one glove to confirm it. The blueness is back. His happiness is gone.

_There goes my last chance._

Sniff.

Shego rises and folds her arms. "Okay, why did any of us think that was ever going to end any differently?" Her eyes skip over to him when she says "any of us," and Drakken doesn't miss the knife concealed in her voice. That means she's talking about him.

"Because I am an evil genius of world renown," Drakken replies with another sniff, a haughty one this time, "and that child is no more than a -"

"'That child' was a thousand times better at this than you've ever been." Shego quirks an eyebrow his direction and kicks a piece of Mega-Weather-Generator refuse out of her way, as though it means nothing and she can treat it however she wants.

Kind of the way she pinched the strings of his apron before she dropped him to the floor of the synagogue.

"Only because he had _my_ evil in addition to whatever raw talent he might have!" Drakken shoots back. Even being bragged about doesn't help his evil any. It lies in his stomach like an old meatball.

Shego sighs heavily. Meaning she doesn't feel the need to dignify what he said with an answer. As if she has any room to be exasperated after what she put everyone through today.

In that instant, Drakken hates her for ditching him. He hates Kim Possible and Chickenpox the Destroyer or whatever that two-bit hack of a villain called himself and his ex-best naked mole rat friend for getting what they wanted and leaving him to deal with his life. He hates HenchCo for being complacent in the whole matter and not even bothering to reimburse him for his troubles. He hates himself for willingly surrendering the first peace he felt in ages.

And, in some small way, he hates himself for being upset over _any_ of those things.

What kind of supervillain is he? Drakken groans, reaches for the corner of his desk and squeezes, gripping his fingers bloodless. If only he had the Attitudinator, he would be able to turn himself either completely good or completely evil, instead of this unhappy crossbreed!

Returning to evil - it reminds him of that time he was plucked out of a toasty warm Jacuzzi, dragged away from it, and tossed out into the snow in his swimsuit, just because he wasn't _technically_ a paying guest at that hotel. He's shaking, in shock, hardly able to breathe.

"Well, Shego," Drakken says crossly, "I certainly hope you have learned your lesson."

An eye-roll. "And what lesson would THAT be, Mr. After-School Special?"

"Never ditch me!" Drakken shoots to his feet again, and this time he doesn't fall over, just wobbles, and he even manages to jut his chin farther at her. "Agreed?"

Shego pauses and then slings herself across the arm of a chair, bringing a new definition to the phrase idle threat. "Well, I'm definitely not gonna ditch you for _Stoppable_ again."

_It's not a promise. It will never be a promise,_ Drakken thinks in a daze. He drops back to his bum and parks his elbows on his knees and holds his cheeks.

His evil convulses inside him, nauseating and overwhelming him. It's like getting a flu shot, Drakken tells himself - absolutely, one-hundred-percent necessary, but miserable for the next few days. Once it wears off, though, he will be protected from the viruses that seek a haven inside him. If someone as wonderful and deserving as Drakken doesn't get a haven yet, viruses sure shouldn't.

_What was I thinking? That I'd use the Attitudinator to take all my evil back out?_ Drakken shakes his head, achy and full of doorbells. No, he should have used it to drain himself of all good. Once that was gone, he would have no more fears, no more doubts, no more regrets, no more hesitation.

There would be nothing left to turn inside-out.


	33. Showdown at the Crooked D

_33\. Never count out the Possibles. The Possibles are coming. No matter where you hide, they will find you. When they do, you need to be prepared for them!_

At least it isn't winter yet.

That is the only "blessing" Drakken can think of, and even it is moot at this point. Scientifically, it makes an equator of difference whether or not the winter solstice has come upon them, but those are things the body can't physically distinguish - even Dr. Drakken's body, which should be more tuned-in to science than any other body on the planet. Nonetheless, Drakken shivers as the late-autumn winds slip in through the cracks in the barrel and swoosh in through the entrance hole, that vast expanse left by Drakken's waist.

Drakken aches from forehead to pinkie toe from being trampled in the stampede he _did_ mean to start - his only mistake was overestimating how fast he could get free of it. It's not very comfortable in the barrel, either, with his back smashed into a curve and the wood scratching at his bare legs, but he doesn't dare come out, because he has no idea where his pants are. His authentic, wowful, macho-fying pants with their branded silver belt buckle that betrayed him, albeit only due to the laws of physics. This barrel is not coming off until there is a pair of trousers within arm's length.

Below him, the henchmen still scramble through the blowing dust, heading for their horses or for the unmarked van rental that got them all here. They, too, are eager to escape from the Possible clan. The Possible clan who he went out of his way to avoid a confrontation with. The Possible clan who tracked him down anyway.

The Possible clan who stood there and watched while his pants were torn away like shingles in a windstorm.

Drakken moans and presses both hands to his thundering temples. Maybe if he closes his eyes, if he keeps them closed for a good long period of time, when he opens them again, maybe he will be in his bed back in his suburban lair, and it will still be yesterday morning, and all of this will have been nothing more than a bad dream.

Bad dream is right. A good forty-five percent of the nightmares Drakken has had over the years have stranded him half-nak - err - _disrobed_ in front of all of his worst enemies.

At least Ann wasn't there. (Kim Possible was bad enough.) He would have keeled over in front of her pity - and if she had been standing there in marital agreement with James, Drakken suspects he would have become the first human in history to begin spontaneously secreting magma.

No, no good. Not magma. Reminds him of Wisconsin. He was so close, _so close_ to having his own little scale model of an empire, and all he ended up doing was bringing a slab of aged Swiss to a boil.

The words begin to pummel Drakken again. Even though he never heard that first set spoken out loud, it takes little effort to imagine them in a monstrous voice. The second set - James Possible, his own voice just as scornful and twice as cold as it was back in college.

_. . . you do not meet the requirements for attending the World's Greatest Minds Convention._

_You'll always just be Drew Lipsky - the science student who couldn't make the grade._

They beat at the inside of Drakken's head like a tom-tom - no, more like a tomahawk, intent on cleaving his skull in two. Over and over and over again they hit him.

Make the grade? _What_ grade? He was bringing in straight A's right up until the day he dropped out.

How much of their history has James rewritten?

Drakken should have let Shego rewrite his _face_ when he had the chance.

Is that a real phrase, "rewrite someone's face"? No. . . wait. . . isn't it "rearrange"?

Several people needed their _brains_ rearranged this week. The Global Convention of the World's Greatest Minds sparkled in Drakken's thoughts whenever the light touched it, right up to the moment when he received an unapologetic slip in the mail telling him he was not qualified to attend. Not qualified. Huh. They've never even met him. They've never watched him disassemble a machine, restring faulty wiring or replace a defective gear, and put it back together again; never seen him warp himself into another person's body by way of a brain-trading machine he built himself; never stood in the lab and observed him as he concocted a lethal embarrassment potion. How long Drakken has waited for an audience other than the skeptical Shego and the openly-scoffing Kim Possible and her ignorant friend.

Of course, Drakken hates having his concentration broken while he works. But these are all fellow scientists, and surely they understand. They will not barge in and interrupt him at the height of his genius, they will wait until the end, and none of their questions will be petty or stupid. Why, in their company, in their friendship, Drakken might have even been able to stop -

Instead, they rejected him. Sight unseen. Drakken went to the trouble of typing his inquiry up on the computer, spell-checking it, and printing it out, yet he might as well have scribbled it down in pacific-blue crayon for how seriously they took him.

So of _course_ he had to invent the Silly Hats to drag their much-lauded IQs down into the single digits, to ensure their tongues would hang out and their eyes cross, looking far sillier than Dr. Drakken himself ever had, thank you very much. No one who ran across that ranch full of babbling men running in circles could consider them intellectually superior to the man who engineered their downfall.

Drakken's teeth begin to chatter, the top row clacking off the bottom, no matter how tightly he tries to gnash them together. He purposefully invited everyone on the list _except_ for James Possible. Despite how tempting it was to watch James walk around drooling, the common sense that Shego keeps saying Drakken doesn't have won out. The Possibles would tear his scheme to pieces as they did so many times in the past, so it was better they didn't know about it.

And then what happens? James shows up anyway, with all three of his kids and the buffoon-kid in tow. Also a couple of people - a cowgirl and a cowboy (together, are they cowpeople?) - who Drakken never saw before but could identify as Possibles right away from their snooty faces.

How did they find him? Do they have him microchipped? _Curses, why didn't I think of such a thing first?_

Well - because - because - because it chafes his sense of fair play, that's why! So offensive even _his_ twisted brain never went there.

Besides, what good would it do Drakken, anyway? Tracking chips on the Possibles would only show them getting closer - and closer - and closer - and he will have to pack up and leave and run away, only to have their little blinking dots on his trail no matter where he goes in the world.

Even after Drakken tricked them with the old fake-key-ring-on-the-hook trick - something he _always_ wanted to try! - he had precious little time to gloat from the _right_ side of the bars before an enormous metallic horse with glowing red eyes broke down the jailhouse door. It was trademark Possible work, a blend of traditional and technological and terrifying.

_Would_ have been terrifying. To a lesser man.

Of course, Drakken reassures himself, anyone would seem a lesser man next to an enormous metallic horse with glowing red eyes. Its hooves glowed a haunting, bluish shade of white, and Drakken recognized magnetic energy in the instant before his belt was gone and his pants with it. His legs immediately gave up the illusion of being long and sturdy - they scarcely managed to carry him out the door.

His one stroke of luck was that he had found a barrel and climbed into it, just as he has seen Donald Duck do in the old shorts when his feathers explode off him, _before_ he crossed paths with Shego again. Anything else would have resulted in undoubtable cardiac failure, Drakken knows.

Even now, the Possibles are probably all sitting around the dinner table and remarking on what lovely boxer shorts Dr. Drakken wears, pastel yellow with even-paler-pink polka dots. If James Possible could force those words out of his sanctimonious mouth, even sarcastically.

_You'll always just be Drew Lipsky. . ._

James barges into Drakken's head again. Drakken gasps softly and, on instinct, throws his body against the left side of the barrel, but the words find him just as easily over there.

_. . . the science student who couldn't make the grade._

Acid bubbles in Drakken's chest. Not stomach acid. The type that can eat through titanium.

_Please, please, please, be a bad dream!_

Drakken opens his eyes, and - it's not. Wood still presses into the backs of his kneecaps, which feel oversized and clumsy compared to the rest of his legs, and exposed. Exposed to the open air, if not to Shego's inscrutable glance, the glance that _knows_ what varmints are and won't _tell_ him.

"So, world domination bites the dust _again_. Second time in two weeks," Shego says from the driver's seat. At the sound of her awakening snark, Drakken breaks into a sweat beneath his neckerchief. Her mouth is flat - no twitches of amusement, no sympathetic hang to the corners.

Drakken gives her a concurring growl and stares doggedly at the horizon. (Why do they call being stubborn being _dogged_ anyway, when dogs are _far_ from the most stubborn creatures in the animal kingdom?) It wasn't really about world domination this time. It was because someone - several someones - lunged at Drakken and raked their nails across his ego, and he had to put them in their rightful places, seventeen platforms below him in the video game of life.

(_You're mixing your metaphors,_ Shego would say now. Whatever _that_ means.)

The thought - not the mixed metaphors, but the wounded ego - skewers Drakken so sharply that he fully believes a splinter has imbedded itself in the unprotected skin of his thigh. A quick peek into the barrel reveals that not to be true. No, he is simply facing the idea that being told you're not a genius after all. . . well, pardon the pun, but it smarts.

And that's ludicrous. Short-sighted. Telling Dr. Drakken he's not smart is like telling him he's not blue. The matter is not even up for dispute. Just because someone - several someones - deny it doesn't make it any less the truth.

Drakken straightens and pushes back the brim of his cowboy hat. No, this was not about putting salve on those burns (as the teens today call insults, Drakken is hip enough to know). It was a world-domination thing all along, had to have been. When the world was deprived of its greatest minds, he would become the most. . .brilliant. . . est (still can't figure that one out) by default. Then who would the leaders call on in their times of need?

Dr. Drakken, that's who.

_Then why didn't you invite James Possible and ruin him too?_

Drakken pauses and shifts, uncomfortable in the barrel, too hot, too cold, too _something_. Because James Possible is two years older than him and three inches taller, and Drakken can feel every millimeter and millisecond of that gulf when he's around the man. Because James can turn him back into Drew Lipsky with one glance. Because that cruel line on James's face - a smile, maybe, the kind of smile Drakken still has to fight to achieve - when Drakken's pants flew away can inflict a rare type of pain, worse than Shego's jabs.

_I invented the Silly Hats! Didn't steal, outsource, or borrow! I made them myself!_

And it still didn't wring a drop of respect from any of them.

"Yeah, and speaking of dust," Shego says. "You've got some on your. . . everything."

_Now_ her mouth is twitching. Drakken turns away from it. He doesn't want to think about his everything. The Possibles pretty much _saw_ his everything.

Somewhere below him, his Silly Hats lie in ruins, either crushed by the stampede or dismantled by the Possibles. Drakken hopes for the former. It's a lost battle either way, but at least that would be one less opportunity for the Possibles to have slaughtered his dreams.

"Yes, well, never mind that, Shego. A true genius can handle a little dust," Drakken says, interrupting himself to sneeze seven times in a row. Rather poor timing on his respiratory system's part. "And he can certainly come up with another plan - one even. . . more. . . brilliant. . . than this?"

Not a sound from Shego, and Drakken knows that this time, he has said it correctly. He grins, though only for a moment. He and James Possible are both going to walk freely to their beds tonight, their times behind bars just memories, and slide in between the covers, but only James is going to be able to go to sleep peacefully, untouched by all he has said and done today.

How is that fair? It isn't - it _can't_ be.

Drakken scratches at his neck. His soul is still inside-out and smarting, the flannel lining flapping in the same breeze that raises goose bumps on his everything.


	34. Dimension Twist

**~Wow, was THIS a fun one! Hope you all enjoy.~  
**

_34\. Be careful who you trust and when. Sometimes it's not immediately obvious. And sometimes it_ is_ immediately obvious, only you're telling yourself it can't be, and then you end up defeating the purpose of things being immediately obvious!_

Mr. Sit-Down is too innocuous a name for this foul felt creature. Drakken knows he could think of worse. If he could think of worse, then maybe, just maybe, it'll distract him from the pain.

Yes, errr, the only problem with that is that this is the sort of pain he can't be distracted from, the sort in his back. It starts right at the base of his neck, which sticks out so vulnerably where his hair should be and isn't, and streams downward in hot rushes. He is an egg frying in a skillet, broken open in the middle to let the yolk leak out.

So Drakken's thoughts come in - _Fannie_ \- _ow_ \- _tush_ \- _ow_ \- _rump_ \- _ow-ow-ow_!

The good news is Kim Possible has left. The bad news is she and the buffoon and their naked vermin have fled, abandoning Drakken and Shego to the underbelly of. . . he shudders. . . cable TV.

Kim Possible's plan, the one she spouted about plugging the interdimensional hole with monkeys, rang true to Drakken's scientific mind. But Shego's expression was so hard you'd need a pickax to chip at it, and she was _sometimes_ a better judge of situations. . . _certain_ ones. Equating Kim Possible's good guy status with an inability to lie and trick, not being faithful to Shego, plugging interdimensional holes with monkeys - those are all mistakes he's made before. Well, the first two, at least.

So they stayed. And Kim Possible turned out to be telling the truth.

_Ow. Ow. Ow._

After what has certainly been hours, years - surely starlight is shining right now that wasn't visible from Earth when they entered the television - someone speaks up, high-pitched and schmaltzy enough to fasten Drakken's contacts to his eyeballs. "Okay, Mr. Sit-Down. I think their time is up."

Mr. Sit-Down obediently rises, and Drakken remains in a heap on the ground. All of his body parts are complaining at once, and he doubts he can stand. With this much pain, _something_ has to be broken, right?

Evidently not, because Shego reaches down, grabs him, and hauls him to his feet. Slowly, joints slip back into place, fluid pops, blood vessels calm. Drakken shudders again, more from the old-man sound of it than the pain.

"Now," the puppet continues, "_have_ you seen anything green?" It stares at Shego with false felt eyes that Drakken resolves to plaster all over his next torture chamber.

Drakken watches Shego turn to stone again right there in front of him. When she speaks, it is in a voice like lemonade, sour-sweet. She doesn't want any more dealing with Mr. Sit-Down, either. "Um, actually, sorry to break it to you, sweetie, but Dr. D. and I have another appointment," she says. "We're due at the, uh, children's hospital any minute, right, Dr. D?"

She nods at Drakken, and he quickly surveys the surrounding area. There is no one else to believe, so he nods along with her.

The puppets let out one big disappointed moan, but they don't summon any more towering demons to take Drakken and his sidekick down. Shego grabs his wrist and hauls him across the fields, through the colors - too happy, too garish - until she hits a spot where the field simply _ends_. Moving her legs just jogs her in place.

"I guess we've reached the end of Teletubby Land," Shego says.

Drakken makes a gallant dash to her side. Well, it _would_ be a gallant dash if he didn't trip over something long and slithery in the grass and sprawl on his bared tummy.

"My hero," Shego says, only there is nothing genuine in it. She strides over to him, her heavy dark mane swinging as she reaches a hand down to him.

Drakken bats it away and stands up on his own strength. He just realized how. . . uncomfortable he is. Not just in the areas where Mr. Sit-Down left his mark, but in the ridiculous skimpy costume the Evil Eye Trio stuck him in. It sports none of his lab coat's generous padding, and he would wager that a greater ratio of skin is being exposed here than when he left his pants behind in the Crooked D's jailhouse.

See, he has to think about it in terms of science, or else he will burst into flames and burn himself down to the ground. Drakken turns his back to Shego, hoping that silly cape will at least cloak him better from behind. As he does, he catches a glimpse of what tripped him. For a minute, his pulse panics, thinking it's a snake, and then it settles into a delighted dither as Drakken realizes it's actually a wire, its end an open plug.

"Shego!" Drakken reaches down, snatches up the wire, and almost hugs it in his glee. "Shego, look, I tripped over a wire!"

"Congrats," Shego says flatly. "The judges give you a 7.2 for form."

There are no judges around. She is just _razzing him_, as the teens today say.

Undiscouraged, Drakken bends back down parting the stiff green blades to reveal four more wires, lying parallel to each other like snakes in the grass. "Ohhh, yes!" he cries. "I knew there would be more!"

"Joy," Shego says.

"Don't you see?" Drakken tells her. "Kim Possible's disabled the Pan-Dimensional Vortex Inducer and taken it away! That means we're no longer stuck in a loop of dimensions. All that's left is us, a few cable channels, and my VCR. And _that_ means where we are right now is like - okay, if we kept going through doors to get to other dimensions, this is like the storm door in front of those doors!"

"Oh, goody." Shego gazes down at the nest of wires with something less than affection. "Was that on your bucket list or something? 'Stand in the storm door between dimensions'?"

"Actually, yes it is," Drakken admits. "But - even more importantly - it's our way out!"

"What is?"

"These wires! Oh, can't you pay attention?" Drakken sticks on the question mark, hears the whine on the edges of it, coughs it away and says, "I'm going to need to do some energy readings."

Shego sort of hisses. "How do 'energy readings' work in a place like this?"

"Simple." Drakken straightens, tugs his cape forward around his ribs. "I will make use of my five senses!" He pauses. "No, wait, make that _four_ senses, because I shall not be tasting anything!"

"Oh, good," Shego mutters. "You're not a _complete_ lunatic."

* * *

Several minutes later - minutes which seem infinitely shorter when not being crushed by Mr. Sit-Down's buns - Drakken clears his throat and gestures to the four wires. "It's just as I suspected, Shego," he says, doing his best to keep from lapsing into squeals. "These wires correspond to the buttons on a VCR. This first wire that I found - "

"By tripping over it," Shego interjects.

"_That I found_," Drakken shouts over her, "it's the 'control wire,' so to speak. It must correspond to the PLAY button. See how it's in the center? PLAY buttons are always in the center on a VCR. Now, the play wire emits a certain barely audible frequency at a rate of three beeps per minute. This other wire here rushes ahead at a rate of six per minute, so it must be FAST FORWARD. This other one plays three beeps per minute, but it plays the sounds _backwards_, so it must be REWIND -"

"Yay. Yippee. Science is great, yada-yada." Shego rolls her eyes. "But how does this _help_ us?"

"See this wire here?" Drakken points to the one farthest left. "Its energy is traveling outward, not inward! Which means it must be -"

"EJECT," Shego says.

Drakken glowers at her. "Shego! You spoiled my big reveal!"

She doesn't say she's sorry, and she's not. Instead, she points at the EJECT wire like she's accusing it of a felony. "Why should I believe this is going to work?"

"Because. . . because. . ." Drakken runs through a crushed list of logic in his head and can't find anything better to finish with than, "Because it's going to work, that's why!"

"Yeah, I've heard that at least twice today. And it didn't."

Drakken's shoulders shrivel, wishing for their pads, wishing to be part of a body that's kept a mystery from the outside world. "If I hadn't listened to _you_, it would have!" he snaps.

Shego pulls back and raises her fingers in their last-warning, pre-plasma stance. Drakken doesn't need energy readings to detect how close her flames are to the surface. Yes, she's had a rough day, but not as rough as his - the fact that she is standing there in her actual outfit testifies to that.

"Be-_cauuuuuse_," he says, "that was when I had to work with the Pan-Dimensional Vortex Inducer, which I don't kn - which there isn't a lot of information available about. But I know how to program my VCR!"

Shego slowly claps her palms together. It stings him as if he's between them.

"Now!" Drakken hoists the EJECT wire, which is almost thicker around than his arms. "If EJECT is connected to the control wire, we shall be out of here in no time!" He extends a hand. "Shego, the control wire!"

"Should I click my heels together and say, 'There's no place like home'?" Shego asks. Some of the mirth has returned to her tone.

"Do whatever you want," Drakken says, "just as long you can do it connecting this wire to mine!" That last part seems almost unnecessary to add. Shego could pretty much do ballet while finishing a cabinet, as far as Drakken is concerned.

Shego grabs the control wire and jams its plug into the EJECT socket. A blueish portal takes shape, and the beating of blood in Drakken's ears grows faster and faster. Before he can scream for joy, the portal assumes a pseudo-gravitational pull so intense it instantly swallows them.

Drakken is turned upside-down and then knocked around in a round room, but the pseudo-gravity knocks him tightly onto each side in turn, as though he is traveling through a set of narrow pipes. Then a long tunnel opens up in front of him, drags him forward in a buildup, and then blows him out. Even as Drakken smacks, all four appendages at a time, onto his lair's floor, he can only compare interdimensional travel to being sucked through a tuba.

They're _here_, though. They're _alive_, and they're here!

"Home sweet home," Shego says beside him. She has landed in a tangle of limbs, but she stands up and shakes them back into place as if they are no more hassle than a set of empty, tipped beakers.

Drakken himself is slower to rise. Yes, this is his lair all right - yet earlier today, he thought the same thing, only to be confronted with three caped crusaders out to rid the world of mullets and lab coats. If they have wound up on another reality show -

But the luscious potatoey smell of soup doesn't fill the air, and for the life of him Drakken can't find that one patch of wall they painted sky-blue to match his skin. He focuses on the dark maroon interior so that the wall appears to be moving closer, growing, coming to him, which could be attributed to either a minor head trauma or dizzying hope.

On the strong possibility of the second, Drakken risks peeking down at himself. And rather than his navel, he sees the green jetpack-button on his belt. And he can see it, fully, without that slicked and shined wedge of hair hanging down over his eyes like a shade someone has pulled too low.

The runny-egg feeling has returned to his back, but how he is supposed to care about that right now?

Drakken raises a hand to swipe at the back of his head. The bristly strands confirm it._ Houston, we have a ponytail!_ He feels a smile bounding across his face, the biggest and widest any of his have been since Kim Possible triggered his ingenious trap-trap.

"Shego!" Drakken leaps upright and only staggers a touch to the left. "Shego, I look normal!"

"Eh, I wouldn't go _that_ far," Shego says. "But it's nice not to have to look at your knees anymore."

Drakken blinks. His arms are suddenly too long, much too long, and despite his orders to hang straight at his sides, they curl up at the ends like the page corners in his favorite science manuals. "What - what's wrong with my knees?" he demands.

"Oh, for the love of. . ." Shego flicks a glare at the ceiling. "What do you want me to say, Drakken? 'Your legs are flawless and put mine to shame'?"

"Ewwwww." Drakken takes a few steps backward - or at least, he must, because he finds himself getting farther away from her. Doesn't feel those steps, though. "No."

Shego's lips twitch. That could mean a variety of things. Drakken wishes once again for a strand of her DNA - not to clone this time, just to place under a microscope and analyze. There has to be _some_ part of her that will bend to the scientific method someday.

Drakken lifts his fingers and drags them back from his forehead to his spikes of hair. _Ohhh_, his spikes of hair! They gave that nasty Evil Eye Trio a heap of trouble. Admittedly, there have been times when Drakken despised those spikes, too - the childish way they spring from his forehead, how thick and soft and fluffy they are, that they have a menace factor of absolute zero. Right now, though, he wouldn't trade them for all the tea in China.

(He doesn't even like tea all that much, anyway.)

Best of all, he's wearing actual _clothes_. His lab coat cradles his body gently, protectively, with the careful grip of a jeweler, where the stupid rags the Evil Eye Trio put him in tossed him around and didn't care one bit if he slipped right out of them.

It allows his genius to catch up with him, and Drakken blurts out, "Fatal Fanny, that's what they should have named him! Or - Rump of Ruin! Or - Derriere of Doom! Or - no - I've got it - Posterior of Prodigious Proportions!"

"Sure, Doc," Shego mumbles, already halfway to the door, hoisting her bag. "Whatever you wanna call him. I'm gonna clock out for the night, 'kay?"

"'Kay," Drakken replies.

Drakken runs his hands up and down the warm fabric, relishing how it squeaks under his gloves. For the rest of the day, as he pores over what he can salvage of the cable box, he keeps coming back and touching that fabric, particularly around the waist and the lower legs. Touches his spikes and his ponytail, too, whenever the reminders of his bareness crawl back over him - memory-ghosts, the only kind that he can believe in as a scientist.

Too bad that little inside-out place inside him won't tuck back into the hole _it_ left behind.


	35. Overdue

**~Ha-ha, this one was so much fun. :P~  
**

_35\. Okay, so maybe Doomsday devices and file cabinets don't belong in the same room. . ._

On his hands and knees, Drakken crawls out of the rubble of another broken dream.

Literally. It's as if someone took a hacksaw to his vision of himself as world ruler and left it to crumble alongside the ragged pieces of the Centripetal Oscillator. A reflective shard lies a mere inch from Drakken's right knee, its black sheen seemingly engaged in the same struggle as Drakken to keep its dignity, and he has to swallow against the hitch in his throat.

Shego stands nearby, surveying the wreckage with boredom. A sneer crouches on her lower eyelids. Drakken wants to yank it away, to yell at her that he is not the only one today who fai - fail - _fell_ slightly short of success.

And Kim Possible wasn't even _there_. Just the buffoon and the rodent and the metallic body of the kid who Drakken knew was a robot all along. She's defeating him by _proxy_ now?

The thought pinches Drakken's blood like an aneurysm, and he grabs for whatever remains of his hope-rope. (Much too cutesy a saying. He must never share it with anyone.) "Give it to me gently, Shego," he says. "Is my Centripetal Oscillator totaled?"

"Yep," Shego says, and Drakken can't detect so much as a proton of gentleness in her delivery. "It's actually kind of amazing _you're_ not totaled."

Her words are sharp enough to trim his hair, and just imagining that, something coming at his head, preparing to shear his security away from his neck, floods Drakken with hot adrenaline. On the strength of that, he gathers his limbs and begins to rise, looking down at her, having to reach a little farther than he would like to find his haughty self. "Of _course_ I'm not totaled, Shego," he tells her. "I have the durability of a -"

His left ankle bows out at a painful forty-five degrees.

"Ow, ow, ow!" Drakken cries, sinking down again.

"_An_ ow-ow-ow," Shego says flatly.

Oooh, the _frustration_! Drakken lifts his head and glares at her. "That's not what I meant, Shego!" he says.

"I know," Shego replies through twitching lips.

Humiliated, foiled, _and_ degraded. How can this day get any worse?

For an instant, the type of despair a villain should never experience pulls Drakken's spirit down to his toes, and he throws himself prostrate across the floor. He hears a _click_, feels the push-in of a button, and he realizes what he has activated and just how his day will get worse 3.35 seconds before it happens.

A jetpack sprouts on either side of his lab coat and fires into the air, dragging Drakken with it. The flames burn faster and hotter and higher than he remembers. Someone is screaming, screaming shrill like a girl, so it must be Shego, has to be Shego concerned for him for once. Drakken fumbles, fingers refusing to cooperate, with the belt, but he can't get it off in time.

He hears a crunch. Feels a crunch. And the next thing he knows, he's staring up at a blue sky bruised with peculiar black and purple clouds. Even more peculiar considering the sun is still shining.

Drakken tries to wriggle free and can't, arms jammed in a stretch, wrenched against him by what remains of the ceiling. This has to be how criminals felt back in colonial days, strapped into stockades that restrained them and prevented them from fleeing the mob of townspeople who stepped up to hurl rotten vegetables at them.

And there is nothing beneath his legs - well, no, that's not true. _Everything_ is beneath his legs, but there's nothing _immediately_ beneath them, and if he falls his twisted ankle will be the least of his injuries.

Someone pads across the lair, approaching Drakken's dangling legs. Without glancing down, Drakken knows it must be Shego - not only because she is the only other person in this building, but because if footsteps can manage to sound droll, these do.

"Ladies and gentlemen," Shego says to no one, "here we observe the rare blue-billed sapsucker, known for its erratic, almost kamikaze flight pattern."

Her voice continues to chew on him. "_Stop_ it, Shego!" Drakken squirms in the ceiling's jagged, confining grip. For being so tight, it can't even do him the favor of cutting off his circulation, stopping his blush before it can start. "It was an accident!"

This doesn't soften Shego any. "Have you ever noticed how accident-prone you are, Doc?"

"Accidents can happen to anyone! That's why they're called accidents!" Drakken takes a breath, and his heart rate begins to - well, not slow down, but steady itself, no longer hammering harder in one eardrum than the other. Yes, he is the boss, and it is he who shall lecture, and she who shall listen. "Accidents can happen to anyone! That's why they're called accidents! Why, in fact, _Consumer's Guide_ reports that ninety-six percent of. . . err, owners of homemade jetpacks crash in this fashion at least onc - _twice_! In their lifetimes."

Okay, now he is bluffing, but so is everybody else when they use statistics, right?

"Uh-huh," Shego says. "Got any numbers on accidents that could have been prevented if people _didn't keep bowling balls in their file cabinets_?"

His partner in crime. She should be clapped in the stocks next to him. Instead, she's at the front of the mob, arms loaded with spoiled cabbage.

Drakken can only hope the red blotches of shame are low enough down on his neck that they will be covered by his collar. "Well - errr - _gkkkk_ -"

"Why was that even in there?" Shego flashes her face up at him. On its pale surface settles one of her few discernible expressions - _Drakken, you are pathetic._

Drakken gives her the only answer he can. "Under B. For 'bowling.'"

Shego explodes into laughter, the kind that almost rocks a person backward. There are times when Drakken loves to hear her laugh. This is not one of them. Each individual note squeaks as it collides with his self-confidence, striking at it again and again until Drakken is sure it, too, will blow just like his Centripetal Oscillator.

A few million years later, Shego appears on the roof and works Drakken free from his little enclave. "Well, so much for your little plan to get the world to revolve around you," she snips at him.

Seriously? Drakken feels the corners of his mouth twisting downward. He spent an entire monologue on his plan to control the orbit of the Earth, and _that_ was all she got out of it?

Still, the frown flips upside-down before too long. By saying that, Shego has (quite unintentionally, but brilliantly nevertheless) made him the smarter of their duo. Drakken polishes his knuckles against his clavicle and glances down at the hole he left behind, in the rough shape of a bullet that he's seen on Old-West TV shows, only much larger. Closer to a bullet _train_.

I _made that bullet-train hole._

It's a nice thought.

"Really, now, Shego," Drakken says. This time, he doesn't have to reach at all, extracting haughtiness from embarrassment in the way only the brilliantest of chemists can. "The planet couldn't revolve around me - nor could it revolve around any other person! A planet would need another heavenly body to revolve around, preferably the largest one around for lightyears so that its gravitational pull is strong enough to attract all other - Shego?"

Shego is staring straight ahead, her eyes as blank as wax.

"Are you listening?" Drakken asks.

Shego responds with an unrepentant blink. "Sorry, Doc. You say 'body' and my ears just close up all by themselves."

Drakken draws his blotchy self farther inward, elongating his shadow over hers. He points his own eyes at her and slams his hands down on either side of his belt. "The point which you _missed_ is simple: he who controls the Earth's orbit -"

"Or she," Shego interjects.

"Gkkr! Yes, he _or she_ who controls the Earth's orbit has the power to mess with the tides, the seasons, the climate - even Daylight Savings Time!" The potential spills out before him, an all-you-can-eat buffet of global destruction, and Drakken almost chokes at its disappearance. "Just think of it!"

Drakken thrusts his arms toward the sky. The dark bruise-clouds have also vanished. "And it all would have worked if -"

" - it weren't for those meddling kids and their nosy mole rat," Shego finishes for him, only that wasn't at _all_ how he was planning to end that sentence. Twitches animate the skin around her flawless smear of black lipstick again. "Don't think I didn't notice how you jumped on a stool and screamed like you were expecting that thing to eat your face."

"Don't be absurd," Drakken says, waving a hand. "Everyone knows rodents are herbivores. Except for the mutant, flesh-eating type."

Fingers seem to snap in Drakken's brain, and he finds himself smiling for the first time since he and his Centripetal Oscillator blew up together.

"No," Shego says.

"'No' _what_?" Drakken hears himself threatening to screech. "I haven't even suggested anything yet!"

Shego shakes her head. "You got that _look_, though."

Drakken immediately goes to work blanking his face as Shego helps him down from the roof and he limps back into the lair, a weakness that depresses him, especially combined with how his back keeps creaking and groaning the way the pipes in his abandoned-warehouse lair do when he tries to run hot water. _Especially_-especially when the door swings open to reveal every knob and wire of his Centripetal Oscillator littering the floor of the lair. Drakken supposes if only one of them could have survived the explosion, he should be grateful it was him.

Hard to be grateful, though. His power-needle has been shot across the room and lies limp by the back wall, pointing at nothing, so forlorn. The only thing that could be worse is if it had skewered _him_, and it already sort of feels like it has.

As Drakken picks his way toward the large crater left in the center of the lair, his mind swarms. Bowling balls as instruments of devastation. Of course; it's _perfect_! All he'll have to do is create seven large bowling balls, anonymously donate them to each continent as abstract sculptures - say something nice and schmaltzy about trying to inspire the next generation to seek peace through modern art - and then, at the appointed hour, he could control the balls remotely, commanding them to flatten everything in their path and not stop until the leaders of the world knelt before him and begged for mercy.

He wants to take a hacksaw to their dreams, too. Or maybe even take one to them.

It's not the idea that startles Drakken, but its vividness - every hue saturated, every nook and cranny expertly shaped, every impulse encased in clear plastic. That and the fact that there is nothing within him beckoning him to pull away from it - and so he doesn't.

A grin forms deep inside Drakken, a grin that feels harder, grimmer than his usual wide-spreading one. Another piece of his soul turns inside-out and spins away, and he doesn't know how to retrieve it.

More importantly, he doesn't know if he cares to.


	36. Rappin' Drakken

_36\. Maybe you_ shouldn't _put your picture on the bottles._

Drakken squirms inside the cramped cut-out window of the letter _R_, his arms pinched tightly to his sides. If he'd had them raised the way most of the audience did, the letter would have slipped right over him, kept him free to make an escape, but Kim Possible had just _landed_ on his head, and he was a bit - just a bit, mind you - winded from the experience. So now he wriggles around, a goldfish caught in the tank filter, listening to the buffoon finish up the rap he's performing about his pet hairless vermin - a "naked mole rat," he called it in the song, probably because nothing really rhymes with "vermin." (Well, there is "merman," but how you work that into a song, even Drakken can't guess.)

The buffoon. Not even a contestant. Not even on the ballot.

Kim Possible stands over Drakken, eyeballing him with fixed casualness. (Is that the right word? Because _casualty_ feels very much like the wrong one. . .) Drakken searches for the telltale invisible shine on her upper lip, an indicator that she at least broke a sweat bringing him down. Nope, nothing but perky red lipstick. He wishes he could scribble a mustache across it like he did during his brilliant performance.

The judge breaks away from the crowd eating the buffoon up with a spork or whatever the saying is, crosses over to them, stands over Drakken, and smiles. It's the same smarmy, charming smile he gives all the contestants, win or lose,so -_ it's not over yet!_

Drakken slathers on his own most appealing grin, trying to restrain the natural pout in his lower jaw. "So - do I win?" he says.

"Actually, you're disqualified."

The judge's voice is so indifferent that it takes Drakken a moment to realize the man is lowering the boom on him. When he does, heat zings through Drakken's bloodstream, right down to the spot where his wrists are crunched against his hips, the spot where he is sure his circulation has been cut off completely.

"Says who?" Drakken says. His throat pulses and strains, keeping _his_ voice low, menacing, and very, very deep. In his own way, _he_ is lowering the boom, too.

"The police," the judge says, and the word is a laser, searing through Drakken. "I don't know what this means, but they've 'confiscated your warehouse' and they're 'coming to get you.'"

He twitches his hands in the air. Finger quotes. Because he's cool.

Only - _I'm cool too! I'm off the heezy! I studied everything! I did the research! I learned how to be cool! Which means I should win!_

_Why am I not winning?_

"Shego!" Drakken hollers. "Shego!"

She can't be far away, and she must hear him, even over the ecstatic crowd. But she doesn't come, and she still isn't coming, and he is all alone with the entire human race compressed into these two people whose stares shun him.

"Shego!" Drakken cries again.

"Oh - that reminds me," Kim Possible says. She stands up and flips back the curtain to reveal Drakken's sidekick in the backstage shadows. Any second now, she will roll her eyes and chide him for making a scene, and everything will be all right.

Yet as she steps into the spotlights, her face isn't as pineapple-prickly as usual. It's blank, a computer monitor with the screen turned on but no programs running, and her movements, as seamlessly choreographed as ever, nonetheless are stiff and tactical. It's like watching a strong, pretty, graceful robot.

Such as the Bebes. And the last time Drakken saw _them_ move, they were creeping in to destroy him.

"Shego!" Drakken yips one last time.

Kim Possible tilts her head. "She _might_ have gotten a spray of Brainwashing Shampoo during the fight," she says, glancing at the judge as if they are co-conspirators.

Shego gazes ahead at Drakken, her eyes wide and compliant. It was a wondrous sight to behold when she was under her Neuro-Compliance Chip, but seeing her now and knowing it's not his doing chills into him in a way even the trendy red sweatsuit he so carefully chose for his performance can't block.

All right. All right. It's not the end of the world. The Brainwashing Shampoo wears off. . . right? How long did it take Lutz to stop running around the lair pretending to be a chicken? Or did he ever? When Drakken looks back now, he thinks he might recall Lutz pecking for seed right as Drakken raced out the door tonight.

_Face it, Drakken. You lost again._

But he doesn't want to face it. No, more than that. He _can't_ face it, he _can't_.

Drakken tries to aim a kick at the underside of the letter that imprisons him. It would, too. Letters have always been tricky little devils, with their innumerable phonics rules and their covert gatherings where they break all those rules. But he never dreamed the arrangement of his own _name_ would turn against him.

There is only one thing to do. Drakken continues to bawl Shego's name until the police arrive. The judge wanders off, probably to give the buffoon a record contract. (If anyone even releases records anymore.) Kim Possible spends the time shaking her head, and Drakken hopes that at some point she will mistime it and flog herself with her own hair, but of course she never does.

An officer clips Shego's hands into cuffs. Drakken can't tell from this distance if they're being gentle with her or not, which is not something that typically crosses his mind, but never before has she been put in a position of being unable to protest.

On his way back to his dressing room, the judge stops and nods at the police. "Get this scum out of here," he says. Drakken immediately forgets about Shego.

A second officer lifts the _R_, and Drakken would bolt for the exit, except he has no feeling whatsoever in his limbs anymore. The next thing he knows, his own arms are pushed behind him, the base of his own neck caught in a harsh grip. The cop's burly chest barely moves as it drones his Miranda rights. A shove on his back, and Drakken stumbles forward, staggering beside his captor. Even within his ultra-hip white size-six sneakers, his toes are like clumps of slush.

Drakken's last glimpse of the studio depicts the buffoon with people clawing at his clothes and asking for his autograph.

It doesn't matter. Rap is stupid. The whole thing is stupid. He wishes he had never bothered with any of it.

But they were _so close_. So close to having mind-controlled the entire hair-washing population of the worl -

Oh, _no_. The door opens, and Drakken turns away from the frigid early-winter winds that lunge forward to slap him in the face with this new revelation. What about bald people? They wouldn't be under the shampoo's power, because they would never shampoo. A resistance will be formed.

Admittedly, a resistance consisting of old men and cancer patients doesn't sound very troublesome, until Drakken remembers that some of Eddy's biker friends back in high school used to shave their heads, and he gulps.

Still - still - he can work around that, Drakken decides as he is loaded into the back of a squad car and buckled in. All he'd have to do is use the same formula to create a type of - of - scalp-polish and market it alongside the shampoo!

And he wouldn't put his picture on the bottle this time, just in case Shego was right about the reason for his low sales. Struck him as a rather unkind thing to say, especially considering it wasn't really _his_ picture. Oh, it started out a snapshot of him, but editing software can perform many miracles. Drakken kept the curl to his nose but hooked it forward into an evil beak of sorts, stretched the smile to demonic proportions, made use of the reverse-red-eye tool to create crimson beads that loomed underneath heavy, sullen hoods.

Drakken sits up a little straighter and then collapses against the window-without-a-handle. According to that judge with the attitude problem, the police have already confiscated his warehouse. Imagine - his beautiful chemical creations in the hands of a bunch of loutish officers.

Though perhaps, if there is any justice in the world, the police will be stupid enough to pour it all down the drains. Then he would at least have an army of sewer rats and phytoplankton and maybe even some of those alligators that Eddy used to swear up and down lurked beneath the Middleton manholes.

Better than nothing. Especially the alligators. But the police are never stupid when they need to be.

Drakken fumes over the unfairness of the whole thing all the way to the station, scooted as far away on the seat as he can get from a silent, spacey Shego. Only when the squad car comes to a halt and an armed policeman unlocks the door from the outside does Drakken remember where he is headed, and his spirit is shredded.

Prison. The rectangular gray government building that is kept fresh and sanitary, yet somehow always manages to smell of filth and health code violations. Food made from vulcanized rubber. Jumpsuits the color of humiliation. Cots constructed of ninety-eight percent needle-springs and zero percent lumbar support.

A policeman goads Drakken down the hallway, using his fingertip as easily as he would a blunt club. As Drakken steps forward, he realizes his hands are shaking, rattling the cuffs together. Judging from the shrill sounds of his tennis shoes on the tiles, his feet are in a similar state. Even his mouth trembles, even as Drakken rolls it inward so no one can see it.

This is strange. He's been defeated and arrested more times than he cares to recall, and, yes, he's spent plenty of time afterward with the shakes of anger and fear - but seldom has he known the type of seismic activity quaking beneath his flesh right now. When Drakken drops onto a bench at the end of the hallway, his leg bounces and bucks as if his femur has been replaced with a shoddy electrical wire.

Prison.

Last time he was in prison, he went through the lunchline and ladled himself a tray-full of lukewarm macaroni and cheese, one of their less inedible dishes. On his way across the cafeteria, Monkey Fist stuck out a monkey-foot and tripped him. Drakken went flying - he managed to keep a hold of the trail but not the food. The mac-and-cheese spattered all over the front of an enormous guy. Drakken stood there gaping at the man, frozen by his traitorous and counterproductive adrenaline, trying to determine whether the man was wearing brass knuckles or if those were really his.

It didn't matter once he'd buried them in Drakken's collarbone. His other hand encircled Drakken's wrist and pulled it to the side in ripping, clockwise increments. If Drakken's bloodthirsty cries for revenge - okay, maybe he was shrieking for his life - hadn't alerted the three guards it took to peel Knuckles off him, Drakken had no doubt the man would have kept going until he'd broken Drakken's wrist, possibly even until his hand fell right off.

Drakken presses against the wall and listens to the talk of processing and phone calls and rap sheets until it all becomes a beehive in his head - it would lull him to sleep except that everyone, everywhere also has a stinger. He turns to look at Shego, who keeps her glazed eyes fastened straight ahead of her. He has promised the both of them never to mind-control her again, but this time he cannot help himself. He issues a shaking command - "Shego. Tell me everything's going to be all right."

"Everything's going to be all right, Dr. Drakken," Shego repeats.

Monotone where it should be sharp. Like taking a swig of soda only to find it's some stale off-brand that doesn't even fizz or bubble.

A female officer appears after several minutes, takes hold of Shego's elbow, leads her around a corner. Shego follows, hapless and helpless, and Drakken's guts pitch inside him. This is the greatest fright he's ever known. This feeling, this worry, this - this - _pulling_ on his hopes and dreams until the strings cinch and he can't move without the approval of the enemies who hold his wires on the other end.

He wants to harness it, make it tangible, use it as a weapon against Kim Possible. It is more frightful than anything he could build, outsource, or concoct in his lab.

Drakken presses his shaking self back to the wall once more, arms in a fold that the police should interpret as stubborn rather than. . . whatever this is. This is what he gets for playing nice, for brainwashing the judge and letting him _think_ he invited Drakken onto the show of his own free will. Shego is always telling him to go for a more subtle approach with his schemes, and he gave it a whirl, and _this_ happened. It wore off.

So it _does_ wear off. Phew.

He should have just charged onto the set, held a doom ray to the judge's temple, and taken the whole crew hostage to get his song out on the airwaves.

Drakken pauses his thoughts for a moment as something creeps into place beneath the shivers. His soul has turned inside-out again, and this time he can see the pattern of its underside. It's a beast of both ferocity and subtlety.

If only he knew what to do with it.


	37. Team Impossible

_37\. Just because Kim Possible doesn't show up doesn't mean you're home free._

His shoulder blade itches.

Drakken rubs his shoulders against the back of the seat. Vinyl peels off, landing on his back, doing nothing for his mental state.

The brownheaded member of Team Impossible charged with watching Drakken - the one with the Giant Punching Death Fist - taps his fingers idly against his knees as he gazes out the window at his compatriots. Who are even now pulling enormous calculators from their pockets and converting a too-happy villager's gratitude into greenbacks.

"Err, excuse me?" Drakken ventures. "I don't suppose you could scratch my shoulder for me, would you?"

The man pivots in his seat, his eyes whittled down to slits. His already-tight-stretched uniform swells further as he shifts his legs. The itch freezes and falls off like a wart.

Drakken folds back against the vinyl, away from the man. "No? Okay then. Never mind," he says just as the itch begins to start up again.

For the first time all day - well, okay, maybe just for the first time since Team Impossible loaded him in the back of this low-budget squad car - he wishes Kim Possible were the one to have taken him down. _She_ might have scratched his shoulder for him, and if she didn't, the buffoon certainly would have. It's the inherent goodness of those children that makes his heart throb in the roof of his mouth every time he looks at them. Where is their hate, their brokenness, their everything-else-he-was-already-carting-around-by-the-time-he-was-their-age?

Outside, the sun shimmers off the snow, nearly blinding Drakken. Large lumps of tough, stiff Alpine snow, weathered onto the landscape by centuries of harsh winds and low temperatures, beyond melting. Not at all like the wimpy powder they get in Middleton.

Aside from the gleam of sun on snow, nothing else is bright about his situation, Drakken laments. Unless you count the fact that he's never been arrested in Switzerland before, and that unknown can spark his scientist-curiosity if he lets it. He wonders if they really do all speak like they're yodeling all the time and if they will serve him the hole-punched cheese with his lunch while he's in jail -

Oh, who is he kidding? Drakken feels himself sag around the still-sore middle, loosening the seat belt that confines him to the spot and the biting ropes beneath that keep him from unbuckling. An arrest is an arrest is an arrest is an ar - anyway, it's just going to be more of the same.

An excessively lighted police station with cops feigning Superman all over the place. Scads of paperwork, paperwork for days, paperwork for forever. A holding cell not big enough to serve his pacing needs, where he will perch on a tissue-thin mattress and stare into space until Shego's face appears between the bars and her plasma claws them away. And it will all be so, so cold.

And he's _already_ cold from kneeling in the snow as Brown Hair tied him up. Drakken shivers, the sound of fabric against vinyl intensifying his plethora of aches, and longs inside for some of his mother's homemade hot chocolate. It was always thin and watery, because they were on a tighter budget than - than - well, a Swiss cop, apparently. But Mother made every molecule of it count, and it went down warmer and richer than the laws of chemistry said it should.

Brown Hair snaps around again and glares undisguised contempt Drakken's way. "What are you smiling about?"

Drakken realizes that he has, in those last few thoughts, softened into a smile. He deletes it, aims a scowl in the big man's direction. "Wouldn't you like to know?" he says, his voice ripe with bitterness. Doesn't tremble or catch or anything.

The man raises his hand and pulls it back. His fingers are huge in the air, sturdy and rectangular like wooden Jenga bricks, and Drakken shoots backward into the vinyl again as if it's a portal, as if he can burrow through it and go straight to Narnia or Candy Land or someplace without cops and lawyers and vigilantes.

Brown Hair laughs. Drakken supposes that's what it's supposed to be. It's closer to the sound the gangsters in TV movies make when they release a big puff of cigar smoke.

Footsteps sift through the snow then, and Drakken glances sideways out the window to avoid the sun. The other two members of Team Impossible approach their car. If he were them, Drakken muses, he'd be sauntering toward it but good. They don't. They _stride_, the way army generals do, and when they slip into the front seat they pack it full and snug. The squad car seems to become a clown car, only there's nothing humorous about any of it.

"How'd we do?" Brown Hair asks his teammates.

The dark-skinned, bald man with the neat black beard reaches into his pocket and pulls out a wedge of paper. "We have an IOU here for a hundred thou," he says.

"Swiss or American?" Brown Hair says.

"American, of course." No Hair leans back in the seat. "Not our best score, but not bad."

He passes the paper to the third man, whose short, hard red haircut looks more painted-on than anything else and who handles the paper as if it's a clipped coupon instead of a representation of more money than Drakken's had in his possession since the day he stole the buffoon's loot. If Drakken could spit on them without getting his neck snapped, he would.

"Not bad at all," Red Hair says, "considering how easy this job was." He jerks his jaw, firm and resolute, toward Drakken, and Drakken clenches his own, hoping to at least put some corners on it.

"Oh, yeah," Brown Hair says, reaching across to smirk at the paper. "This was the easiest trash-hauling we've had in a long time."

As one, the men turn to look back at Drakken, who is ready to gnaw through the ropes if he has to. Those beaver teeth he was teased for all through middle school have to be good for _some_thing. He waits for their stares to accuse him of terrible things, knowing he will welcome those accusations - he _has_ done terrible things, after all, and the great majority of them he's proud of.

Instead, they skim over him, brand him a child, half-heartedly stamp biohazard symbols on him as if they barely consider him worth the effort. For once, Drakken can relate to his perky, perfect nemesis. They looked at her the same way.

And they're so _different_ from her, showing up with bombs that they lobbed into every corner without even giving him a chance to surrender. Kim Possible never has bombs - she's not old enough to legally handle those types of explosives, so she usually just turns his own machines against him somehow. She always strikes some kind of cheerleader pose and demands, "Give up, Drakken!" before he snarls a denial and she strikes, and he can't believe how much he would have appreciated that today.

Drakken shoves a foot into the seat in front of him. "You have no idea who you're dealing with!" he warns them.

Their heads don't so much as turn. They're done with him. Drakken leans back, skin itching every place the rope touches it, thinks about Mother's hot chocolate, and wills his waffling lower lip to remain steadfast.

_Look at you, Drakken,_ some disgusted part of him hisses. It used to sound solely like Shego, yet over the past few weeks it has changed, deepened and expanded. _You're pathetic._

_I am not!_ is what bounces immediately into place in his brain, but a moment later Drakken stops and sighs.

It's true. Look at him, daydreaming about hot chocolate and fretting over the size of his future cell mate. Cowering behind these men for whom clobbering a guy in the ribs was just another day at the office. It takes no effort at all for Drakken to picture what Professor Dementor and the rest of the villains will be saying about him on the HenchCo forum once it gets out that a single punch took out the great and formidable, but not especially brawny, Dr. Drakken.

He is the wimpy powder snow.

He needs to be the immovable Alpine kind.

That's it, then. Drakken straightens and glares out the window. The time has finally come for The Big One. The hardest, sharpest, coldest, _brillaintest_ plan of his or any other supervillain's career, the one that has been coming to him in hard-won fits and starts this last year.

Cybertronic technology camouflaging its own might. Synthetic life flowing through the bodies of multiple puppets. The clock striking midnight, marking the beginning of an era, ringing in Dr. Drakken's undisputed rule.

He just hasn't worked all the bugs out yet. . .

Drakken turns back to the window again. There's still a dull soreness in his stomach from where Brown Hair walloped him, but he can feel something else there, too, something so cold and comfortable, diffusing into the rest of him like some wicked red chemical through a vial of clear liquid. His soul is once again flipped inside-out.

He will do everything in his power to keep it there.


	38. So the Drama (1)

**~And so it begins. . .~**

_38\. Be tough. Be strong. Be calm._

Well, _that_, Drakken decides, turned out to be an all-around success. He and Shego escaped victorious, he got to lob his best burn ever at Kim Possible (that's what the teens today call insults, _burns_), and he was able to prod the barebones information he needed from the decidedly word-stingy Big Daddy Brotherson.

No, not _stingy_, Drakken corrects himself. _Thrifty_. The man parcels out words on a strictly controlled ration, so each has time to soak before it's spoken. Big Daddy, much as Drakken hates to admit it, can pack more menace into a few syllables than Drakken can in all the hills and valleys of his villain-rants.

At least, more than the _old_ Drakken could.

And that, mayhaps, is the biggest win of the night. He left graspy, whiny, fidgety Drakken behind in the dim interior of The Bermuda Triangle.

His back is going to ache for weeks on end, but what else is new, right?

"I think that went very well," Drakken says as he tugs at the _pink_ bow tie Big Daddy's henchman had the _nerve_ to force on him. The straps pull away, and it's like he has gills that were being blocked off and now he can finally breathe again. With a swift motion that only tangles the bow tie in his ponytail for three brief seconds, he whisks it off over his head, throws it to the floor, stomps up and down on top of it for good measure.

Shego grabs his arm with her long fingernails. "Doc, have you ever considered switching to decaf? Seriously. It's usually better if your eyeballs stay _in_ their sockets."

Drakken feels them bulging now and inhales to settle them and everything else. Ordinarily, a remark like that would rankle him, throw him into confusion. But he gulped his prescription ADHD medicine an unscheduled five hours ago, and his stomach acid has already broken down the chemicals, chemicals that have made their way to his brain and held it steady. "I must focus on my plan," he tells both of them.

"Yeah. Which is what, exactly?"

Drakken swallows the explanation, and it nearly blisters on its way down. "I would prefer to keep that under wraps for now," he says. He can feel the rumble in his chest, slow and calm, catching their world and sticking it in place. It will resume orbit if and only if he decides it should.

Shego freezes in mid-taunt. She peers up at him (well, not really _that_ up - now that she's wearing high heels, her eyes are level with his, if not higher) as if she is looking at a hologram of someone she knows. Her expression isn't vulnerable exactly, yet it's not quite bulletproof either. "You what?" she says.

"Our mission tonight was successful, Shego," Drakken says, crossing his arms. "You have done well. Please, take the rest of the night off and get some well-deserved rest. Return to me in the morning."

A frown gathers, slight but unmistakable, on Shego's forehead. Her upper lip doesn't make it into a curl. "Okaaaay," she says.

She has not, in all her years as his sidekick, known confusion, at least not the kind Drakken knows - the kind that serves as a paralytic and blurs your surroundings into frightening, unfamiliar areas. This is the closest he has seen her, and he doesn't wish it upon her, truly he doesn't, but how good it is to be on the opposite side!

"Well, g'night, Doc," Shego says. She spins her hair around with an audible swoosh. He can read, more easily than Big Daddy's pinched-together handwriting, the _Drakken-you're-so-weird_ written in her straight-backed posture. Even in heels, her intimidation quotient has been dialed down as she makes for the door.

It claps gently shut behind her. No slam, which would have bewildered the old Drakken. Now, thanks to the psychology class he passed - a glorious A-minus he can still see when he shuts his eyes at night - it makes perfect sense to him. She has to control her temper, because in that moment their roles were reversed, and she can't let them get further reversed, cannot lapse into a violent outburst characteristic of Drakken's former self.

Oooh, he _understands_ these things now!

Drakken grins to himself and starts down the black-as-jet tunnel-hallway that leads to his room. He can make out the maroon-clad bulk of his Synthodrones even without the assistance of their neon-lime glowing eyes. His own eyes haven't seen the sun in over a week, and they've begun to adapt.

And he doesn't _want_ to see the sun. Not up there, throwing light over everything. The dark down here is bigger. Stronger. And it's all under his control.

Drakken nods to the Synthodrones even though they are deactivated and strolls with care past dark smears he knows are doorways until he reaches the one that leads to his room. He turns the knob precisely thirty-nine degrees to the left, hops lightly in, and gives the door a soundless swing shut.

_Then_ he buries his face in his pillow and lets out a squeal of delight.

His last, he's sure.

But, oh, he's got to tell _some_one! Someone who can't - who won't - tell anyone else.

Eric is Drakken's first choice, but he's charging in the stasis tank downstairs. Apparently pretending to be a high school student really takes it out of you. Drakken supposes he could deactivate him from time to time, but that's a lot harder to do to a Synthodrone who has a face.

Drakken rolls over and stares into the face of another good option. "Want to hear a secret, Sir Fuzzymuffin?" he asks his teddy bear, with its zigzaggy scar and its sullen eyebrow that match his. Once upon a time, as the old Drakken, that filled him with comfort. Now the bear is just an instrument of retaining confidentiality.

That _must_ be true, because for the first time Drakken doesn't imagine the bear responding to him. Of course, Drakken always knew their dialogues were truly monologues, yet now he cannot begin to fathom how naturally those "conversations" came to the man he used to be.

With a shudder, Drakken sheds that remnant of his past and tells the bear, "I'm going to conquer the world."

He begins to recount his plan in gory detail. Nakasumi's design. The cybertronic technology. The usurpation of that one fast-food Mexican place. The distribution. The Syntho-distraction dropped into Kim Possible's life. The stroke of midnight.

"And then, the cybertronic technology shall draw itself from its hiding place deep inside those innocent-looking toys and roar to life! It shall expand! Grow weapons! Get a _very_ snazzy villainous makeover!" His voice peaks as his genius reaches the climax of the most crucial plan he's ever conceived. "And it shall destroy everything in its path! I, Dr. Drakken, will finally have created that which cannot be repressed, cannot be defeated! Whatever I don't want in my world - I will _demolish_!"

A full-strength cackle rings ever so brilliantly off the walls. "The best part is - I no longer feel any guilt about it," Drakken whispers into Sir Fuzzymuffin's ear. (Yes, he can whisper now, too.) "The meek don't inherit the earth. The _mean_ do."

With another laugh, Drakken swings his legs over the side of his bed. "That's exactly the type of attitude I need now," he continues, "to face the man who holds the key to cybertronic technology. Dr. James. Timothy. Possible."

Drakken lets each name fall to the floor and burst open in little bombs the way Big Daddy did. In his case, they kind of disappear beneath piles of dirty laundry and scattered, mutilated teen magazines, but that's okay. Something was missing from those words when he said them and from his own body's reaction to them, something whose disappearance isn't at all unwelcome - just unexpected. His mind keeps fiddling with the spot where it used to be, just like his tongue used to worry the gap left behind by a lost baby tooth.

Despite his galloping pulse and his clenching fists and the burnt-toast taste in the back of his throat, Drakken realizes he is no longer afraid.

Ever since the incident with the Bebes - the new, improved, deadly Bebes - Drakken has been - well, not exactly _afraid_ of James Possible, but with a very healthy respect for the fact that the man is bigger than he is. Stronger than he is. Capable of picking him up. Protective father to his arch-nemesis. Add to that the inherent awkwardness of running into an ex-friend and the fact that James knows how to shove the past right into Drakken's jugular, and, gee, it was never a good thing, running into him.

Now -

Let James try to resist. Let James refuse to talk. Oooh, how Drakken hopes he does refuse. He's got a brain-tapping machine stationed in his closet. Its mammoth drill-bit, encircled by twinkling lights, is silent and, Drakken bets, agonizing.

Drakken strikes a dastardly pose before his dresser mirror. Yes, his soul is ripped inside-out, the lining exposed and flaking away.

Luckily, it's more flammable that way.


	39. So the Drama (2)

_39\. Be as cruel as you need to be. Maybe even more so._

Drakken leans back in his CEO seat of honor, his suit rippling in silken layers against his back. One, twice, he shifts from side to side, seizing himself before it can evolve into a squirm. No, he doesn't squirm anymore. Kim Possible doesn't _make_ him squirm anymore.

But for the first time in over a month, a lump the size of a dinner roll presses against Drakken's windpipe. All those clear-breathing weeks have made him as sensitive as a fairy-tale princess to even a pea-sized lump. His goal bulks large in front of him, so close he would have to be a brainless loser, like Kim Possible's little friend who just called him, not to reach it, not to touch it. And now _she_ has sprung up between him and it, thinking she blocks his way.

What she doesn't know is that he had her ensnared long before she left her big cozy house for the prom.

Tonight, she will be educated. Tonight Drakken will illustrate, graphically, for Kim Possible what it means to be powerless, how it feels to watch your world ignite around you.

Drakken's grip on the side of the desk tightens, whitening the tender skin beneath his fingernails. He doesn't have to scroll back through his memory very far to recall that - it could be as recently at this January, when Team Impossible's veritable air raid smashed through the roof of his mountainside lair and left it burning. Ugly sounds, hisses that should have been his to throw around, not theirs. Shego ran away, which was fine because it meant she was able to break him out within twenty-four hours, but he was still left on the floor of a lair surrounded by fire. Drakken can remember the sweat pouring out of his palms as he inched, snake-style, toward a distant door, willing the ceiling beams above him to hold up at least until he was out of their way. How that sweat condensed in the eternal Alpine winter as a wordless celebration that might translate as "home free!" gilded his body once he pulled himself outdoors. How it came crashing back into him as that man buried his fist in Drakken's gut, as if he had laced his yellow glove with fear and it all rubbed back off onto Drakken just when he managed to get rid of it.

He was gaining on the stars, only to find out that the objects in his mirror were farther away than they appeared.

That will never happen again. It can't happen again, not now. That was the Old Drakken. New Drakken feels far too sturdy for such a thing to ever happen. Looks too sturdy as well, in the spangled suit, with the open spangled lapels and the black area under them padding the gulf between where his muscles end and where they need to be. Kim Possible may plow into him tonight as she has so many other times, but _this_ time she will meet solid titanium where before there was only wet paper.

Middleton shall be attacked early. In the next hour or two, Kim Possible could be gone for good. The thought strikes him as almost anticlimactic.

Strange.

Drakken rests his chin on the backs of his hands and squints until he is hit with an image he once saw on a nature show. A lioness (in a lion pride, the womenfolk do all the hunting - most people don't know that) yanking an antelope carcass away from a scrawny, shivering cheetah. Yes, scavenging another animal's kill will curtail her hunger just as well. . . but how much more infinitely satisfying would it be to bring the antelope down yourself?

That's it, then. He must set a trap for Kim Possible. Not a trap-trap or a trap-trap-trap or a trap-trap-trap-trap or any of those other ridiculously overcomplicated affairs the Old Drakken somehow believed would work. No, this must be a simple, ruthless trap, one that will neutralize Kim Possible's charismatic, peppy cheerleader-powers, exposing her as a foolish do-gooder who'd taken a mouthful she could never begin to chew.

She will be exposed, and then she will be ended. Alone. Afraid. Smothered in self-doubt.

Drakken gazes around his luxurious office, thoughts seeming to seep out of every object he stands to lose tonight if he fails - the plush velvet carpeting, the exquisitely carved glass of his lookout window, the brass lamp stand in the corner, hunched over as if it too has been captured in a perpetual villainous chortle. These thoughts don't scamper across the walls of his head and dare him to chase them down, like they did for the Old Drakken, though. These line up, one by one, in neat rows, subservient to him, only bending and curving in the ways he permits them to.

The final piece does not fall into place, though, until Drakken's eyes land on the framed photograph on his desk of Eric, one side of his mouth hiked up in a lethally handsome grin. Eric. His pride and joy. The boy whom Kim Possible probably believed was spun directly from the threads of her fantasies, when the actual process was far more complex and scientific, and she will never understand.

Eric. Of course, Eric!

Drakken picks up the phone yet again and punches the speed-dial button for Eric's cell phone. It barely gets one jingle out before those Syntho-instincts kick in and Eric snaps it up.

"Hi, Dad," Eric says. It's the greeting they decided upon together, designed to blend him with the general teenage populace and divert any suspicions. Drakken can feel the smooth glow sliding across his face nonetheless.

"Hello, Eric? Where are you?"

"Just dropped Kim off back at her house. She knows something's up, Dad. She's going to go research the Diablos right now. We don't have much time." Eric's clear, calm voice flows through the phone, unhindered by panic. The very sound of it reinforces the binding in Drakken's spine.

"We're attacking Middleton now. And we're going to lay a trap for her. I need you to come home immediately," Drakken reports, surprised by his own tone - instructional, maybe, or perhaps protective.

"You got it, Dad."

The call is terminated with a click. The dial tone that Drakken usually despises hearing pulsates to the rhythm of his own power.

When Eric arrives back at Bueno Nacho Headquarters, Drakken reviews the plan for him. It's odd to go back to explaining a plan in such detail after so long, like putting in the wrong prescription contact lens, and Drakken hopes he won't grow too accustomed to it.

Eric obediently lowers himself in the chair, and Shego - now barely recognizable without a scoff at the ready - ties him to it. Just as she loops the last of the ropes into Eric's armpit, Drakken impulsively bends down and gives his greatest invention yet a hug. It's the only rash thing he's done for days and days, and yet he doesn't regret it at all. Eric, too, feels strong and stalwart, his Syntho-brawn packed so hard so that no one would ever suspect it isn't real.

"You'll do wonderfully," Drakken says into Eric's convincing-looking ear. "You'll knock her dead."

Eric smiles with the same confidence that turns his thumb up, even as tightly bound as his arms are. "_We'll_ do wonderfully, Dr. Drakken," he says.

Shego says nothing. It must be killing her, Drakken thinks, not to have a single flaw to grab at and rip open. Except her expression isn't annoyed anymore. It is on the near edge of. . . could it be? Admiration?

The ache flushes through Drakken's belly again, same as it did when the Team Impossible man's fist collided with it. This time, however, it isn't hot and churning but cold and steady, as if he has swallowed a Tupperware container and it has somehow insulated his insides from all semblance of fright. He is centimeters away from his goal, near enough to smell the rocket fuel and hear the sounds of terrifying conversions from harmless kiddie toys to weapons of global conquest.

Imagining what this will do to the villain community alone tingles in Drakken's palms so that he has to rub them together to keep them from smarting. The outcast supervillain, scorned by his peers for his lack of wealth and superpowers, shall be the one who finally destroys Kim Possible. Without any backing from Jack Hench, the old profit-hound, no less. Why, won't Professor Dementor's face mask just melt off in his fury?

Still and dark lies the night outside his window. Though it won't stay that way, it has already slipped into his soul and its clinging tendrils guarantee that it won't be budged.

The sun will rise on the reign of Dr. Drakken.


	40. So the Drama (3)

**~The long-awaited end to So the Drama! And the beginning of everything else. . . **

**Love you guys. Take care and stay safe.~**

_40\. What is the matter with you? Why did you put her backpack in the room with her? Why?_

The foolproof has failed.

_He_ has failed.

Diablos clunk off the pavement on all sides of him, the sky hurling them down at him angrily. No, there's a different explanation, a scientific explanation, a scientific explanation that _he_ designed, but he cannot for the life of him remember what it was.

Stoppable's eyes are pitiless. Drakken would know - they are the same eyes his reflection has worn for the past three months, except that Stoppable's eyes are a runny, mud-puddle brown rather than the flat-packed-earth that Drakken has watched dilate and contract and waver in his own mirror.

Drakken can't move, really. Wouldn't want to anyway. He'd just trip over the pieces of his ruined scheme.

Above him, lightning forks and thunder breaks into maniacal laughter.

And somewhere in the stir of sirens and anger, he listens to himself weeping.

* * *

It's no use.

Ever since the tranquilizer wore off, there's been no way for Drakken to sleep. No way to get comfortable, either. How a person can be so cold hunkered down into a ball under a blanket in the middle of April and yet still have sweat collecting on the surface of his skin is a mystery to him.

If he lies on his left side, he is millimeters away from a cinder-block wall. If he turns to his right side, a mattress-mound that he can't flatten no matter how hard he tries makes a dent in his rib cage. If he lies on his stomach, he puts pressure on the wide gaps Kim Possible opened on his lips planting her fist there. Sitting up would be a viable alternative, except that as of two or so hours ago his vertebrae have filed for bankruptcy, declared themselves useless. He can prop himself halfway up on the cot, his pillow cushioning his most achy spots, but that leaves him with a clear view of the TV screens, turned to the world news, which shows the Diablo attack over and over, as if there's the slightest probability that anyone doesn't know about it yet.

The thought that once burst with rich goodness inside him is now a jagged, broken edge, cutting away at the air. The newscasters are talking about him with frowns that seem to be dried on. His deeds and his dreams are being equated not with Alexander the Great or Julius Caesar, but with the likes of Stalin, Moussilni, and worst of all, Hitler.

Hitler. The man who thought he could exterminate an entire religion, an entire race. _Hitler_.

As Drakken falls back against the pillow, half-prone, taking hard, hollow breaths, he wonders if Hitler ever felt this utterly alone.

Kneeling, he scoots closer to the window and peers out. The sky, now sawed into four striped quadrants, is blue-black and starless in the glare of the streetlights. By tomorrow night it will be searchlights. As soon as the work day begins, Drakken knows, he will be transferred to a federal penitentiary to share punishment with all the other men deemed too dangerous to live among society. And women, too. Shego will be on the other side of the yard, across a mile of steel and curlicues of barbed wire.

Something Drakken thinks he read about once in high school, filed more as a trivia item than a memory, careens into his mind. During World War II, the Nazis swept through every country they invaded and stole all the gold. Made it illegal to have it shipped out of the country. A couple of scientists in one of those countries had golden Nobel Peace Prizes and didn't want to surrender them to the Nazis, and Drakken doesn't blame them - if _he_ had a gold medal, he'd never give it up either. A noble chemist melted down the gold and mixed it with aqua regia to disguise it. After the war, the chemist pulled the mixture back out and precipidated the gold out of the acid. The medals got recast, and there was much rejoicing.

Drakken opens his mouth, yet instead of the screams he has never run short of before, out comes a thin, trailing cry that dribbles away. He always thought of himself as the chemist. When did he turn into the Nazi?

It's a bad question, one that makes him feel he is trying to _digest_ an ounce of barbed wire.

Drakken lays a hand across his heart. It patters too fast against his palm, a leftover from the ADHD pills the police confiscated. Heat shivers up and down his limbs, pooling in his joints and splitting to fan through his digits.

With a frown that he knows without seeing to be heavier than any newscaster's, Drakken swivels and surveys the unpleasant little room. It looks the same as it did ten minutes ago and six hours ago, too - the sink, the cot, the toilet, the forty-watt bulb that has been dimmed just enough to subdue shadows and, Drakken guesses, fool the more gullible prisoners into thinking it's been turned off. He waits to smell the musty, moldy smell so at odds with the cell's spic-and-span appearance, but if it's there, he's missing it. Every sense is turned inward, encumbered by pain.

He can feel cells in his throat self-destructing. Hear his enzymes as they do battle with the barbed wire. Taste the platelets working to patch themselves into place over the cracks.

Somehow, Kim Possible won yet again. Got to her gadgets. In her backpack. Word was the backpack was somehow thrown _in the broom closet with her_. How? Did he put it there?

Drakken buries his face in his pillow and moans again where no one can hear him. He must have. There's no other way. The henchmen were instructed not to touch anything, anything at all, not all night, so they wouldn't mess anything up, and about the one thing they can do well is follow orders. And Shego and Eric were much too bright to -

Shego and Eric.

Just thinking their names doubles Drakken over. He wasn't the one to receive an electrical shock that would kill a mere mortal tonight, or the one to drain dry and collapse in a husk, but it sure feels like he did. All night he has been reliving the mole rat's teeth puncturing Eric's Syntho-flesh and the sight of Shego's blood, so vulnerable crusted on a cheek that seemed to be carved out of marble. It's as if Diablo Sauce has been poured in his own cuts.

Drakken kicks the blanket away. Not only did he spoil his own plan putting that backpack in there, but. . . but the people he cared for - they were hurt.

He did put the backpack there, right? He sits back up, strains until he sees himself tossing the backpack into the broom closet and slamming the door shut behind him. But Drakken isn't sure if it's there because it actually exists or because he is forcing himself to remember it in a desperate attempt to tessellate tonight's events, events which still make no sense to him. It's a blur of punches and Eric melting and Drakken crying, "Stoppable!", of Kim Possible curling a cold sneer at him as he was led away, of thrashing toward Shego and being told people died and a freezing room where they emptied his pockets.

Drakken gazes down at himself, at his odd proportions that appear to have shriveled in their drape of orange cloth. His prison-issue tennis shoes dangle a mere inch from the ground.

Sort of like his plans. Left dangling, success just beyond their reach.

Outside, the wind blusters against the sides of the building. It is the only one of them with any bluster left. Although some people find it easier to be brave in the light and much harder in the dark, Drakken has never been one of those people. All throughout his entire career as a supervillain, he has closed himself in darkness and flourished there.

But this darkness - this isn't _his_ darkness. It belongs to someone else, and Drakken doesn't know if it will cover him or slurp him down as if he were a milkshake. He has been stripped of his Doomsday devices, his chemistry set, his authority, his everything-that-makes-him-scary. The uncertainty of his future or the all-too-definite certainty of his defeat - one of them, Drakken's not sure which, gets him to pull the blanket back up and tuck it good and snug around his goosebumps.

The word _died_ overloads his circuits, and Drakken is left with his fingers digging into the mattress for dear life, wishing for a surge protector. People are dead now. All the wrong people. Because of him yet _not_ because of him. At his command yet _not_ at his command.

This Drakken does recall: observing the screens, smiling as he watched skyscrapers collapse in showers of glass and flames. His body puffed up in triumph. Did he think all of those skyscrapers were _empty_ or something? Did he _know_?

Drakken whips back to the window and grapples for the sill as empty-bellied retches spasm up his throat. In the midst of it, he sees Kim Possible, her sleeve and the skin beneath torn back and bleeding. It made him crave more. (Not literally crave. He's not a vampire.)

Nearly three years of fighting her, and he just now managed to draw blood on her. Why? Because she really is. . . all that?

No! Drakken snaps his head to the side. There must be some other variable. Tons and tons of other variables. He would assemble an equation, but right now he couldn't even assemble a basic LEGO tower if the instructions were right at his fingertips. It's been too long since the last pill. It's wearing off, and his thought process is wrapped around his brain like Charlie Brown's kite string around a tree.

_You killed people tonight._

He only meant to kill one.

When Drakken closes his eyes, Syntho-fluid pours across the floor, Eric's chiseled features melt, and Shego is a tiny, green speck against a throbbing-white electrical current. He forces them back open and leans closer to the window, watching as the night fades from deepest violet to a shade that puts him in mind of the thistles he planted last year around the premises of his suburban lair to curtail intruders.

Dawn is coming, Drakken realizes. And it is this knowledge that finally has him spin around, show his back to the coming morning glow. He doesn't want to watch the sun rise on a world that is even less his than it was two nights ago. The light hates him - and it always has, Drakken knows. It certainly will not feel any obligation to him, so he leaves it behind him.

The darkness adopts him.


	41. Car Alarm

_41\. Blood is not thicker than water. Well, technically, it_ is _a denser liquid, but that doesn't mean you can count on Eddy to break you out of jail._

At the moment, it is quiet here.

Quiet once was frightening. Quiet once was lonely. Now Drakken revels in it, because quiet back _then_ meant no Shego, and quiet _now_ means no Lucre, and the difference is abstaining from chocolate versus abstaining from cod liver oil.

Drakken sighs in relief, a sound that ripples off the unyielding walls, which feel cold and cruel under his fingers, cement on three sides, bars on the fourth. Vexatious place. He's basically locked in a lizard cage, only without a heat lamp for the prisoner to recline under. There are even a few crickets - one particularly noisy one on Lucre's side of the room - but they aren't intended as food for the prisoners. Although, now that he thinks about it, they would probably be better than most of the prison cuisine -

A fiery rush of nausea, and Drakken shakes his pounding head. No, he can't think about food, prison-issue or otherwise. He needs to concentrate on his great plan for escaping from jail.

Which is trickier than it should be. The standby from the old movies, chinking a hole in a wall with your spoon, doesn't work anymore - these spoons are plastic, and when you smash them against the wall, they break, so you still have a wall imprisoning you. What you _don't_ have is a spoon to partake of the watery gelatin they serve for lunch.

Drakken _did_ once manage to use a comb to pry up the grate over the shower drain, only to find the opening narrow and stifling. Well, fine! He didn't want to escape that way, anyway. Already feels like he's dripping in sewage all the time around here.

So what does that leave? Filing through the bars? With what, his fork? If only Shego were here with her Nail File of Ultimate Destruction -

Shego.

Drakken gulps. Shego, who laughed at him as Eddy busted down the women's prison with a giant robot almost as impressive was some of the ones Drakken has designed in his spare time. In direct violation of her contract, too! How "lame" - as Shego herself would say - is that? Why, he'd be completely within his rights to fire her - maybe even sue her, if the prospect of spending any more time in courtrooms didn't turn his underarms to marshes.

But revenge isn't what he's hoping for. For non-mushy reasons, he wants her here. Because, Drakken can finally admit, if only to himself, without Shego he has no chance of ever breaking out - except maybe in a rash from where the prison clothes scratch against his skin.

Also for non-mushy reasons, he still feels icky in the innards when he remembers Shego's exposed navel, skinny pants, big hoops on her ears, and the pile of hair that threatened to pull the whole ensemble over backward. He can't believe Eddy put her in that. . . Well, no, he can _believe_ it, but it still galls him. Eddy looks at Shego and thinks he's only looking at someone young and beautiful, not someone smart and feisty and resourceful and vicious enough to make any evil mentor proud, with an overdeveloped sense of sarcasm and hands that never shake, not ever.

Drakken remembers how he defended Eddy to his mother the night the two of them were arrested for the whole Doom-Vee scheme. At this point, he wishes he hadn't, because Mother was right. Eddy is scum, some of their happy childhood memories notwithstanding. Doing - doing - whatever-that-is-called to a woman like Shego, and leaving his own family to rot in jail at the same time?

_He must get that from our fathers' side of the family._

The revelation sends the cot shaking. He can't keep thinking about this. He needs to think of a way out. And _that_ means he has to stand up and pace. It won't help the kinks in his back, but maybe it can massage away the ones in his mind.

Drakken rises to his feet, and the floor weaves under him. Black licks at the edges of his vision, as it does so often these days; the concurrent dread has become so mundane it is barely an alarm at all. He stumbles sideways, and a horrible, wounded-seal sound escapes from him. (He's only heard a wounded seal once, on a nature documentary, yet the sound will forever haunt him.)

No, not even pacing shall be an option. Not when he's still sore from his latest prison. . . altercation. Three men challenged the honor of Dr. Drakken's evil career, and he had no choice but to jump them. They got in a few good blows, having numbers and size on their side, but Drakken had indomitable spirit on _his_ side, and he rained punches down on the biggest guy over and over again, and he kept raining until the guards stormed the multipurpose room and hosed him with tear gas -

All right, maybe it didn't happen _exactly_ that way. It should have, though.

When the guard posted at the cell doors asked Drakken's nice escort why he was being returned to his enclosure so early, he actually said, "Were they beating him up again?"

Drakken twisted around to give the man his most murderous look. No, they were not _beating him up_. He fought back, which is a whole other thing. Men get in fights. Little baby rabbits get beat up. It would have been a lot easier to convince him through that murderous look, if the guard's attention hadn't been pointedly riveted to the not-quite-a-scar still burning on Drakken's upper arm.

And what _is_ a little baby rabbit _called_, anyway? A bunny? A kitten? A pup?

When Drakken shuts his eyes, the darkness doesn't stitch itself into an answer, the way it did back when he was on the ADHD meds. Instead, it reels with footage of Eddy, dripping wet and petrified as two officers load him in the back of a police car.

Across from him, Shego's hair is soaked flat to her body. Water and hatred spill off her. Despite the arms the police have locked across her chest like door bolts, she lunges forward, still trying to cut her way toward Eddy, her long-nailed hands weaponized even without the glove-blades. In her eyes, Drakken can see a type of rage that will not simmer away as long as Eddy still breathes.

It's a feeling Drakken instantly recognizes, same as he can recognize the feel of a test tube, slim and cool between his fingers, even with eyes shut tight. He didn't know Shego could feel it, though. She always goes quietly with the police when it is the reasonable thing to do, and five different officers holding your shoulders definitely qualifies as "reasonable."

Sure, Shego has a temper second only to. . . well, his - but when she gets mad, it fuels her and makes the world tremble. Her anger has always been productive and efficient - yes, that's it - never stuttering and desperate like his own. Never lame.

He should pity her, Drakken knows, yet his pity has been smelted and treated so that it clings to him and him alone.

Drakken peels himself away from the cement and steps forward, trying to settle his footing on the slick surface beneath him. The dipped-in-sewage feeling returns, and he picks his way to the sink before he reminds himself that no, he can't wash his hands and make it go away, that only people with certain mind-sicknesses think it works that way.

It's as if someone is tapping out the tune to that Christmas carol about the drummer boy against his temples from the inside. Drakken plants his hands over his ears, even though they're not the parts of him convulsing in pain.

On his second or third back-and-forth rock, he catches a glimpse of himself in the shine of the sink's basin, and he wishes he hadn't. Not a pretty sight. Okay, so he _probably_ never would have been featured the cover of _GQ_ on his best day. But here? Now? He wouldn't even make good advertising for a funeral home.

Drakken stares at the wasted humanoid staring back at him, and he is sure he can see the life ebbing away from him, leaving the bones to stand front and center. His unfashionable jumpsuit sags away from them like he's trying to wear a parachute. Drakken remembers the money launderer man he fought with, how _his_ jumpsuit wrapped tightly around his chest like a big Ace bandage, and he bites at his lip. He hopes that somewhere, right at this very instant, the man is still trying to wash Drakken-spit from his pores, unable to get rid of the smell and the damp splat of Drakken's loathing.

(Maybe he should try slipping down the shower drain again.)

His skin is pale and chipped, like plaster, carved with black down his cheek. The dark roundabouts under his eyes that he always imagined were so fear-inducing now seem frozen to his face in horror. The eyes themselves have lost their mad luster and are currently just cloudy and tired, bunched from underneath.

Drakken gulps again. If he stands here looking at this absolute wreck of what was once the world's most formidable supervillain for too much longer, he will cry, and that's no good. Even a short sobbing jag will leave his face bloated and miserable - it'll tattletale on him to inmates who practically have laser-scanner capabilities when it comes to such weakness.

Yet he can't close his eyes again to shut himself out, either, or he will see Eddy, nearly crawling into a policeman's lap in his effort to get away from the little girl who wants to wring his beefy neck.

_Little girl._ He shouldn't think that way, either.

Drakken turns away from the sink and shuffles back to his cot, a journey of about five feet that still winds him. The warden said this morning - that was just this morning, wasn't it, when a couple of guards were dispatched to deal with the robot-damage to the women's prison across the yard? - that it was visiting day. Yes, it was, it has to be, because Drakken hasn't yet seen his mother, and he knows she would never miss a day, not even if she had bridge club.

Whatever that is. All he knows is that they don't meet on a bridge.

Drakken glares once more around the perimeter of his cell. Stone looks back at him, and he can't abide its arrogance, either. It makes him unable to rationally hope that while he's in the visiting room, Pyro Pete will go on a rampage and burn the lizard-cage to the ground.

Spending quality time with Mother used to be about as much fun as being handcuffed to a pipe listening to Kim Possible elaborate to the authorities on exactly how she captured you _while_ you were also nursing her flying Kung-Fu wedgie. Now, though, it's different. Mother is the only family he has left. Of any sort. The moment when he walks in and sees her is like the moment when you finally rip off a Band-Aid, when pain and relief vie for dominance in your nervous system.

The cot squeaks as Drakken bends, or maybe that is the sound of his back creaking. It sounds like the perfect atmosphere to interact with his mother, one where she is legally forbidden to touch him. No more cheek-pinches, no more bone-crunching hugs, no more lipstick staining his forehead. And for the first two or three months, it was good.

But.

Today he will sit across from her, so close he can smell the soap he gave her for Christmas three or four years ago, and he will know she still uses it, still treasures it. Her hand will rest on the divider, plump and soft like one of her homemade banana-nut muffins, and Drakken will realize he will never eat one again, and there will always be glass between them, and there shall be no more of her warm touch.

He isn't sure he remembers what warmth feels like.


	42. The Big Job

_42\. This isn't working. You need to get tougher. More prison tats. Maybe even a few piercings. That'll work, right?_

_RIGHT?_

". . .and once your cybertronic technology has quietly infiltrated the homes of unsuspecting citizens - dont'cha love that word, 'infiltrating'? I have from the very first time I ever heard it in the first James Bond movie I ever watched - which - gosh - which one was that? One of them with that one guy in them. What's his name, Pierce?"

The drone. The constant, everlasting drone of the man known as Frugal Lucre. It crowds this underdone excuse for living quarters until there is barely enough room even to hunch.

It.

Doesn't.

Stop.

Drakken clutches the pillow more tightly around his ears and shifts his jaw from side to side so he can breathe. "It's okay," he mutters to the parts of himself that won't quit trembling any other way. "They're coming for me. Any day now, they'll come."

It's true. There are few familiar faces in the lunchline or the exercise yard - well, actually, there are many faces that are becoming entirely _too_ familiar - what he means is that he doesn't recognize many people he knew from the outside (except Eddy, who he's not speaking to anyway). And _that_ would signify that the world's supervillain population is still largely at large - no, that's a weird way to say it. Largely free to plan a prison break for one of their captured compatriots. Any day now.

Surely, one of the world's villains is sympathetic to his plight. . . Killigan? The Seniors?

_Shego?_

All Drakken has to do is think her name, and _boom_, it singes the back of his throat like that one kind of alcoholic drink he tried once and found he greatly disliked. His sidekick has disappeared into thin air, which is not unusual except that _Drakken_ doesn't even know where she is.

Much as Drakken wants to write her off, his mental pen just won't sign that waiver, not with the flourish he loves. When a fight breaks out between other prisoners, he thinks that Shego could beat all of them up if she were here. When two of the guys decide to try and out-swear each other, he realizes that Shego would verbally scalp them all without even moving out of G-rated territory. When it's visiting day, he wonders if any of Shego's brothers ever came to visit her.

She'll come back for him, though, Drakken knows, once she's made aware of how empty a mere sidekick's life was without an employer to serve. She's probably just taking a break to recuperate and psyche herself up to face the prison scene again. Self-preservation instinct - strong in any supervillain, and extremely well-developed in the nastiest of them - prevents a person from charging _toward_ a prison.

_See how understanding and supportive I'm being, Shego?_

Shego may be the biggest contender, but there are others, too. Dozens of them. And one of them will get him out of here soon. When a thing likely to happen doesn't happen, each passing day just makes greater the probability that it will happen the next day. It's simple scientific theory, postulated by - by - someone whose name Drakken forgets. (He doesn't have his books and notes anymore, either.) Why, by the end of the month, his odds of being broken out are going to be very near one-hundred-percent.

By the end of the month. If it isn't already the end of the month. And _which_ month, Drakken has no clue. Inmates in the movies keep track by scratching tally marks on their cell, but at the beginning of his stay, he only expected to be here a few nights at most, and it's certainly too late to start now. He has entered a vortex where time and space have no meaning, a place where experiments cannot be performed because the only constant is misery.

Drakken rolls over onto his right side and winces, anticipating a battle to come between his arm and his creaky mattress, even though the wound under his sleeve has officially become a painless, deadened scar. It finally doesn't smart when he leans his body weight on it. Of course, it probably helps, too, that his body weight has plummeted so drastically since he was first brought in here. . .

With shaking fingers, Drakken rolls up his _other_ sleeve to check not his latest scar, but his latest prison tat, a skull-and-crossbones pirate flag. The colors - blue and white - aren't as vividly saturated as they were when he first applied it, yet it hasn't turned pully and pinchy on his arm, either, so it would probably fool your average Cell Block D imbecile for a while longer. Guaranteed street cred for a few more days.

Whatever "days" feel like anymore.

But by the time it wears off, he'll probably already have "blown this joint" (as they say in "the joint"). Someone will have generously sprung him from prison, and then his life can go straight back to normal. No more cell-claustrophobia, no more Lucre-migraines, no more down-time-flashes of 752, the cursed luminous numerals that mark the number of casualties, creeping up on him.

_This, too, shall pass._

Yes, well, so will a kidney stone, but it's still going to be a terrible, organ-ripping experience until then, isn't it?

"Someone _will_ come for me," Drakken whispers. At least, it's a whisper compared to Lucre.

". . . and, of course, you'd need a signal tower to wake up the cybertronic technology in the first place. Maybe some kinda. . ."

Self-preservation instinct takes over, and Drakken squeezes his eyes shut. It doesn't help, though - he can still see his signal tower pulsing pale smoke as it collapses and takes his sidekick down with it.

Drakken clutches the pillow tighter, and then it switches from being his ally to being his projectile as he heaves it at Lucre's dim shape across the cell. The sound of the pillowcase flapping uselessly to the floor gives Drakken a queasy, oily feeling right about down where his liver is, as if it's producing turpentine instead of bile (and bile is bad enough). Lucre evidently doesn't feel it, because the chatter remains incessant.

". . . actually, you'd need a ton of signal towers all over the world - maybe those fast-food restaurants ya slipped your toys into it - maybe they could - "

Drakken forks a finger viciously toward his cell mate. "One more word from you, Lucre, and so help me. . ." Drakken's voice gives way, and he can feel himself withering.

Silky silver moonlight bounces off the sink.

It's Lucre's longest pause yet, which isn't saying much. "Wow," he says at last. "I love how you don't even ever need to finish your threats because you're already so scary."

_Scary_. The word, by all accounts a compliment, sticks in Drakken's craw like a lump of gristle. Too late to chew it, too hard to swallow it. Yes, he is scary, indeed. If only he had just a tiny bit, just a _gram_ more bravery so he could withstand his own power.

"And don't you forget it," Drakken mutters. He rises to retrieve the pillow, but as soon as he bends over, it feels like an angry little ninja made of dizziness dive-bombs him from the ceiling. And he goes down, right on his tailbone, as pain yips through his body.

Someone across the hall doesn't even bother to muffle a spit-take type of laugh. Drakken whips around to glare at them - what sort of supervillain wouldn't? - and he spots the all-brawn form of another prisoner, the one with all the hoops and studs shoved through every piece of cartilage on him. They glimmer in the murky visibility that is neither light nor darkness as he shifts a menacing half-inch closer to the bars. If you were going to name any man "Pierce," it would be him.

Drakken shakes his head, his ponytail flat and sticky at the back of his neck from sick-skipping his last two showers. This place is driving him to think like Lucre. Get distracted like Lucre. Have ridiculous rabbit-trail thoughts like Lucre. If he looked more like this man -

But he doesn't _want_ to look like this man. He is a mad scientist, not a member of some motorcycle gang or what have you. Drakken swings one leg over the top of the cot, crouched and panting for twenty seconds or twenty minutes (he truly can't tell anymore), before he hitches his other leg up too and lies flat on his back. He was _with_ Eddy when Eddy got his tattoo, and his cousin ground back a scream even as he declared the whole experience to be "righteous." There's no sense in trading pain, hours and hours of pain, for a picture that never comes off your skin.

_Besides, 752 people are flat-out_ dead _because of me. Doesn't that convert to, like, twenty-five or thirty tattoos in prison economy?_ It's the sort of line that might win Shego's snort of approval - which would have its own entry, adjacent to but separate from her snort of disapproval on the Periodic Table of Shego-Noises.

Still, Drakken has seen what being cred-less and intellectually superior gets you in Cell Block D. Pain. More pain. Pain everywhere. There is nothing he can do to avoid it, no direction he can turn to dodge it, the way Kim Possible does and Shego does and every single person in his whole stupid life does except _him_!

Drakken pulls the pillow up to his mouth to hide its quiver, and it floods with the grungy, unwashed flavor he smears across it tossing and turning every night. His body feels like a thin, bunchy rope of licorice, its framework twisted around itself, broken in half and re-braided with everything in the wrong place. He is lonely without any of the perks of being alone. He is recognizable without any of the perks of being famous. He is awake without any of the benefits of being conscious.

Maybe he has already died, and this is the afterlife allotted to manslaughterers.

_You deserve it._ The hiss is a rough catch in his mind, fingernails scratching down wire mesh. Drakken doesn't know whether it comes from the part of him that tells the truth or the part that lies, the part that holds itself up proudly or the part that shrinks down on the mattress and tries to disappear. It surprises him, but it shouldn't. Lots of things that surprise him shouldn't.

Drakken returns to the first night he sent Shego to steal from HenchCo and how he couldn't stop chortling - she called it "giggling" - when she arrived with the loot. "We're _stealing_," he explained to her questioning face, the badness of it slinking through him like a secret tunnel.

Shego raised her eyebrows in something a little like amusement, a little like disgust, and a lot like she had stepped into the room to address a king and found a toddler sitting on the throne, clad only in a diaper and a crown that slipped down to serve as chest plating. He can still hear her voice as she said it - "You are _so_ naive."

The room presses at Drakken from all sides. He can't take it, he can't take it, he can't suffer like this anymore. But he also can't escape the knowledge that so many others have suffered because of him, too. Not just the goody-goody Possible gang. Unrelated people who Drakken had no grudge against. Children. Shego.

Eric.

If he were noble, he would own up to the fact that he deserves to suffer for all the hurt he's doled out. Then again, if he were noble, the Diablo attack would never have occurred in the first place.

And since it didn't work, _wouldn't_ work, never happening would be the next best thing.

Drakken curls up on the mattress inside the black cloud of himself that frequents his nightmares now. He closes his eyes.

_752._

Maybe naive isn't the worst thing a person can be.


	43. Mad Dogs

**~First of a two-part tale for MDaA because I realized I really didn't want to have to address Grande Size Me. XD And, yes, I promise eventual reconciliation!~  
**

_43\. You should have made a huge alien woman who sees world domination as just another day on the job your sidekick a long time ago!_

This has been a real humdinger of a day for Drakken.

Woke up in prison. Moped around in prison. Played checkers with Lucre. Was abducted straight out of the multipurpose room. Spent a good amount of time in a spaceship outside Earth's atmosphere, staring down a laser that would have been really cool if it wasn't going to hurt him. Told Warmonga he was the Great Blue - he's mentioned in an alien prophecy, who'dve thunk?

Old sidekick a traitor. Old lair collapsing. Didn't matter. Now he has a new sidekick who can punch pipes in half, and a new lair, and most importantly, he's not in prison anymore! The walls tower above him, tall and broad and protective, orange and blue-white, obviously having never seen a speck of grime before. He was just preparing himself to dive headfirst into Operation Revenge 2.0 - now with higher-budget effects!

And then Shego had to show up.

She stands there now, her scan of the lair having come to a stop on Warmonga. Shego only stands as high as Warmonga's belly button - or would aliens even have belly buttons? Drakken has never stopped to consider this before. Warmonga has her hands smashed on either side of her possible navel area. Shego's expression is casual, but her posture is stiff, as if she is trying to set every bone in her body at once.

Drakken searches his data banks for the number of bones in the adult human body. He comes up blank.

Maybe he's dreaming - but, nope, a pinch and Shego's still there, flesh and tendons and tissue and hair, so much hair, exactly as he pictured her for - for - for - holy litmus strips, how long _was_ he in the joint? The only thing that prevents Drakken from classifying it as "eternity" is that his time on lockup has finally come to an end and eternity, by its very definition, never will. She is the puzzle piece that will hold the entire picture together, keep it recognizable even with so many other pieces missing, and Drakken approaches her with his arms outstretched.

Once he's beside her, though, his hands cramp into clammy shaking-claws. Perfect for grabbing her and rattling all smart remarks out of her. Drakken hunts for hideous, demeaning terms to throw at her and instead finds only flat stumps of consenents with no vowels to separate them, like Oreos without any filling.

All of this is wrong - her reappearance, her face, her stern straightness. All of it. Drakken's head is a hot-air balloon, a butane flame in its center, pushing its top up and up with its rising heat (_yes, heat rises - all good chemists know that_), stretching the sides longer and sparser, filled with vapor rather than intellect, drifting out of his grasp.

Even in Warmonga's shadow, Shego doesn't so much as blink. "Whoa!" she says. "Someone's been drinking their milk."

Drakken takes a surrepitious step backward and in an equally-stealthy move slides halfway behind Warmonga's fortress of a body. "Warmonga, this is Shego," he says. "The _sidekick_ -" he stresses the word on the off-chance that Shego can be humbled - "who -"

_Abandoned me._

_Betrayed me._

The accusations are true, yet Drakken can't figure out a way to chemically convert them into words without spewing corrosive substances everywhere. Even his eventual, "Didn't break me out of prison!" sounds swollen, as if it has been stung by thousands of wasps.

No movement from Shego. Her understructure of muscle and sinew still fits healthily inside her jumpsuit, bearing no sign of having ever been locked up at all. Drakken is suddenly, stabbingly aware of how his lab coat billows away from a prison-shrunken waist. Of course, he could be wearing a cummerbund and cuff links and still feel underdressed next to Shego.

Warmonga's eyes light up yellow and red. "Sidekick? Oh, so you too pledged your being to the Great Blue?"

Nnnggh. That also sounds very wrong. Drakken turns away and has to widen his stance to keep from flinching.

"Uh-huh," Shego says. "Seriously. . . what planet are you from?"

Drakken peeps out from behind Warmonga's elbow to see if Shego is being sarcastic or not. One look at her face, one attempt to read it, and he becomes the second-grader squinting down at his reader once again, the too-wide, off-eggshell pages, where letters in small, crowded font were herded into combinations that meant nothing to him.

Warmonga extends her arm and holds her hand level like a school crossing guard. "Warmonga hails from Lorwardia! Victor in the battle of the 13 moons of Jingos!"

_Lorwardia_. The name resonates off the inside of Drakken's skull, anchoring the wandering hot air balloon. In the rich, dignified reverberations, he hears support.

He hears _power_.

Shego jabs one pointy finger at Warmonga. The look she gives Drakken is questioning and not squeezed out through selfish slits.

Drakken parts with a shrug before he catches himself. Before the reminders of her crimes pinch him and tie all his emotions together and threaten to strangle him. He shoots a scowl her way, wads his arms together in front of his chest, and heel-swivels away from her.

"Super!" Shego says. "You know how to pick 'em, Doc. Though I do like what she's done with the place."

When Drakken sneaks a glance back at Shego, he expects to be mowed down by her anger.

There is none. Her gaze is unfeeling. She doesn't care about him anymore.

If she ever did.

All the moments Drakken refused to remember lunge forward now and make themselves known in bold high-resolution stills. Her riciduling every single plan Drakken ever came up with, even though it would have been in her best interests to see them succeed. Her dropping his bereft-of-evil self over the side of the hovercraft to make room for the buffoon, who stole _Drakken_'s evil and passed it off as his own, getting away with patent fraud because he made it _look_ cooler. (Sort of like the cotton gin.) Her gliding onto the witness stand at his trial to testify _against_ him.

The Day-Glo-green letters sprayed across the crumbling interior of his lair: _Drakken's a loser. Ha-ha._

Enough of this.

Being separated from Shego is like leaving behind one of his own appendages. But that appendage has gangrine, and he needs to amputate it or risk being dragged down with it.

"Warmonga, show her the door!" Drakken commands.

Warmonga's point lurks at least three feet above Shego's head. "If you guide your vision to the left of our aft reactor core, you can see our primary entrance."

_Oh, nibbles and biscuits, are you serious?_ A magnetic field takes shape around Drakken's forehead, drawing both hands to clamp tightly to it. "No, Warmonga!" he yells. "I mean, have her exit _through_ the door."

Personally, Drakken thinks that was a perfectly-explained request. It still, however, falls short of whatever language one must speak to get through to an excessively-violent extraterrestrial.

Warmonga scoops Shego from the floor and hurls her, a wiry projectile, across the room at what must be the speed of light. It must be, for before Drakken has even figured out that Shego has vanished, she crashes through the door in a detonation of wood. Splinters fire in all directions, and with any luck, they also burrow into his ex-sidekick in some very, _very_ irritating places.

Triumph, ungentlemanly and painful, burns through Drakken. He licks his chops and waits for Shego to get up.

Waits. Waits. And waits some more. Drakken can't even recall the last meal he ate, but whatever it was, it's slowly creeping its watery way back up.

At the very moment Drakken is rolling his tongue backward to see if that will hold back the retches, Shego whirls to her feet. Every pale inch of her glimmers angrily. She unleashes a gutteral noise that she doesn't seem big enough to hold. It isn't the growl she lets out before she dives for Kim Possible with her plasma at the ready. Its rattle doesn't stem from agitation or annoyance.

This is a rage-frustration-hate-helplessness-desperation combo that Drakken knows all too well.

His jerk-of-the-knee reaction is to sympathize with her, but the reflex never gets beyond his kneecap.

* * *

There are only ten minutes left in the countdown. Why isn't Kim Possible here yet? Shouldn't she be here?

Drakken paces in circles around the timer. Each of its glowing digits are longer than he is tall, their value rapidly dwindling _literally_ with each passing second. In less than ten minutes, the Earth's atmosphere shall be deprived of its oxygen, suffocating all who call it home, and while that is a wonderfully aggressive move on his part, it wasn't supposed to be the _plan_, just a lure.

For some reason, Drakken pictures the checkerboard, the game he won back in prison (or _would_ have won if Warmonga had waited another thirty seconds to spring him). All of his pieces are precisely, climatically positioned, blocking his opponent's every path. And just now, his opponent has crossed her arms, turned her back, and refused to make the only move left open to her - the one that will crawl her straight into his clutches.

Is she trying to call his bluff, thinking he isn't mad enough (in every sense of the word) to actually go through with this attack? That at the last second, he will cancel it and spare the planet that has never done a single thing for him?

The Drakken of two years ago might have done such a thing. But now pain has captured the spot where his heart should be. That's a metaphor, of course. Has to be, because nothing except a jellyfish can live without a heart, and yet the beat rapping on his eardrums is a thousand times stronger and more forceful than a pulse.

"Unnnnnnnnnnnh!" Drakken cries. "What's keeping her? I want my victory!"

Beside him, Shego smirks, even with her wrists and ankles shoved into what remind him of glowing fuchsia toolboxes. Seeing her chained up is like eating kale - it tastes foul, but it satisfies the quakings of hunger inside him. He hasn't jeered, "Comfy?" at her yet, the way he never fails to do with other captives. That isn't the role she is playing.

(And he doesn't trust himself not to release her if she says no.)

"Like you could even handle Kimmy without me," Shego says. Her voice contracts around the words in a way he's never heard it do before.

Drakken rotates away from her, but he knows his grin is unmistakable from any angle. "Oooooohh!" he squeals. "I think somebody's jealous!"

He wants her to be. Oh, he wants her to be. Jealousy _hurts_.

And it would prove, once and for all, that her job is - that he is - something worth being jealous about.

"Hey, I'm just sticking around to watch the cheerleader kick your great, blue -" Even from the back, Drakken can feel Shego's eyes taking aim, so penetratingly that for an instant he is sure she _knows_ because those eyes have dived through his layers of clothes and seen for themselves, not just that she's made a lucky guess based on the fact that one's glutes are not usually too differently-tinted from the rest of their body. . .

"Shego!" Drakken barks before the blush can raid his blood vessels and make off with his composure. "It's not going to happen! Because Kim Possible will never be expecting my secret weapon!"

Even now, saying that -_ my secret weapon_ \- rumbles a little maniacal chuckle from him. Warmonga. Bigger and greener and better than Shego. She is the prosthetic limb, steely and unbreakable, that comes complete with lasers and missile launchers built in.

There's a slight hum in the space next to him, and Kim Possible materializes out of absolutely nowhere, in exactly the defiant-checker-player pose Drakken imagined her in. He shrieks - also out of absolutely nowhere - and scrambles backward until he nearly trods on Shego's foot.

She just _formed_. She can teleport now. Or turn her visibility on and off at will. She has once again broken every one of the universe's rules. A blind panicked hum rumbles in Drakken's head. Behind him, a clock is counting down to something, and he can't for the life of him remember what.

He's pretty sure it's nothing important, though.


	44. and Aliens

_44\. . . . . . never mind._

He is nervous.

Not awake-in-the-middle-of-the-night-in-a-cell-with-the-lights-buzzing-and-the-guy-across-the-hall-shooting-you-what-you-assume-to-be-gang-signals-nervous. But not a mere about-to-take-the-mic-at-karaoke-night-nervous, either.

This is most like first-day-of-high-school-nervous. Death and dismemberment are most likely off the table, but so many other things are on - a rat's maze of halls. Gym teachers that lean toward sadism. Wedgies in the locker room.

Drakken tightens his grip on the bathroom sink and thinks back to Shego's acidic expression as she hopped from the rafters of the new lair Warmonga had set up and let sprout. It was certainly the look of someone who was ready to start doling out wedgies indiscriminately.

Shaking his head before it can rehash its memory-list of every harsh hand that has ever snatched him by the waistband and yanked, Drakken lifts his eyes to his reflection and begins to experiment with his own expressions.

The first thing he tries is one of his big, hearty smiles, the one Mother calls "charmer" smiles, the ones that serve as a blaring advertisement for the hard work for Middleton's resident (now retired, of course) orthodonist. But Drakken is nervous about flashing all that hard work at Shego, because she can easily smash it all to pieces. And then incinerate it with her plasma for good measure.

So then he attempts to appear bored - _blase_, as _Villains_ magazine once called it, which sounds much more sophisticated than just plain old _bored_ \- with his lids half-shut and the corners of his mouth level. On closer inspection, it reminds him more of the "You're Dead" animation that blinks up in video games when your character has taken too many hits to the health meter than Shego's trademark, which she probably paints on every day along with her lipstick.

At last, Drakken takes a stab at something stern and severe, eyebrow crawling menacingly down and neck held plumb to the walls. It is certainly the most success he's had yet, and he would grant it an A+ if it weren't for the way his eyes are shaking at the edges as if they are about to jump from their sockets.

Contacts stinging, Drakken lets go of the sink and taps his fingertips together. Keeping himself even-keeled is very, very hard at the moment, and it gets even harder when he goes to fling open the shower door only to knock against a tub rim that comes up to his knees because _this_ shower is a hybrid. Still harder when he remembers that he is in his second-choice lair, the smallish urban one on the outskirts of Middleton, that his favorite haunted-island lair is being rebuilt, that Shego had a hand in destroying it.

The thought sizzles in Drakken's mind like burning bacon, and he aims a glare at the tub rim that dare to further bruise his body, which has already been battered enough. Gentleness is alien to Warmonga. No pun intended.

Comparatively, Shego is pleasant. Drakken perches on the closed toilet lid and shimmies his leg nervously against the porcelain, above the aqua-blue cubic tiles. In certain rooms of this lair, those tiles will fall, block by block, at the push of a button, dumping the unsuspecting occupant to a pool of pirhanas that are undoubtedly ravenous - unless some concerned piranha-rights activist came over and fed them during Drakken's stint in the hoosegow.

Today he will see his sidekick again for the first time in over a week. And for the first time in more than six months, it will not be on hostile terms. They have made amends, patched up their differences, sent the henchmen to do repairs on the main lair, and now everything between them goes back to the way it always was.

Except it doesn't.

Drakken frowns at the tiles. Something is amiss in this lair now - something colorless and odorless and vague, like carbon monoxide. Drakken knows _that_ can't be it, because he just replaced the batteries in the detector - they were keeping him up all last night with that infernal, insistent beeping - but that is the feel of it, something close enough to breathable air for your senses to accept it without questioning, yet far enough away from it to kill you before you can even figure out what's going on.

And then the doorbell rings.

For an instant, Drakken is sure that this room, too, is equipped the piranha trap and that the cubes have begun falling away beneath him, even though that is visibly untrue - not a tile has budged from the perfect _floor_al arrangement. Nevertheless, Drakken takes quick, near-deft steps to bounce himself across the bathroom, down the hall, and toward the front door.

Toward Shego.

Drakken's nasal passages become increasingly soft and loose, as though they're in danger of spilling their contents. In a matter of seconds, he will embrace his sidekick again, feel the safety of her strength, watch her roll her eyes and set his life upright again.

The worries stack on top of each other like science manuals. New, malformed ones land at the top of the pile - _What if Shego hates me now? What if she betrays me again? What if we can never return to being an evil family?_ The old worries - _What if Shego listens better to her MP3 instead of me today? What if Shego picked up some new beau at the beach who turns out to be a shyster? What if Shego doesn't think my latest plan is as impressive as I do?_ \- are last year's editions, out of date and unreliable.

Drakken narrowly avoids colliding with the wall as he puts on the brakes in front of the door. His quivering fingers punch the admittance code into the panel beside it. The numbers, of course, skip around and rearrange themselves in his brain, and Drakken is afraid that he will have to go through all ten thousand of the potential combinations before he gets them in the right order. Yet after only two or three mix-ups, the last numeral, an eight, clicks reassuringly, the panel flares green, and the doors hiss open.

Shego is behind them, staring at him with screwdriver-pointy eyes.

It is not the reunion he has imagined. Her face is as cool and sharp as an ice skate blade, torquing upward, as if prepared to meet something equally cold and smooth.

And Drakken has no idea what that "something" is, only that he is more frightened of it than a supervillain who was ten minutes away from asphixiating the planet should be.

The sizzling in Drakken's thoughts is no longer burning bacon, but an overloaded circuit board. Lacking a surge protector, it spews a fountain of sparks and leaves him holding a smoking husk, the way he has done so many times in real life. The welcome-back he planned to treat her to and the hug his arms were already bending into are fried along with it.

"Hello, Shego," is all Drakken can say. Even then, he chokes on the words as though someone has shoved a fist into his windpipe.

"Hey, Drakken," Shego says. Her voice is wooden, and the wood is unvarnished.

Or something like that.

The silence is so. . . silent that Drakken can hear the refrigerator dropping ice cubes, and it feels like they go smack down his back. He shudders and presses closer to Shego, and then he stops and dances away, because in that moment he understands what equally-cold thing Shego is expecting to encounter. It's him.

Drakken's insides wrench. Equality should mean respect, on _some_ level, but on the bladed edge that looks back at him, it doesn't, only cynicism and suspicion, which have always seemed an insult to Drakken, even when coming from Kim Possible herself. It is nearly as hard to swallow as the enmity she showed swinging down into the snazzy, space-made lair.

Shego parks herself on the couch and unfolds a magazine with a snap. Even her laziness has precision. A gulf big enough to echo yawns in between them, and Drakken wants to cough to fill it up, to push it aside, to somehow neutralize it.

"I'm sure you're just dying to know about my latest scheme, Shego," he says finally. In truth, she probably is not, but he doesn't care if she listens or not. He just needs to talk about the latest scheme, let the details race each other out of his lips, not hold it inside so that it ruptures and begins bleeding internally and infects everything the way it did on - _gulp_ \- Diablo Night.

Shego briefly closes her eyes. That one new girl villain who signed up on Villainster while he was in prison - Karma Chameleon or whatever her stupid name is - wears glittery dust on her eyelids - for what purpose Drakken cannot fathom. But there is nothing decorated or dramatic about Shego's eyelids. They are just two little light-green wells above cheeks, exactly what they became when she collided with the enormous monitor and tossed shards across the lair, exactly what they stayed as Warmonga heaved Shego above her head, in a way that was more fitting for a Flag Captured in that one playground game than one of the most important people in this hemisphere.

A waxy ball of guilt starts to rise in Drakken, and he only barely maneuvers it back down.

"Sure," Shego says after the longest pause thus far in the new millenium. "Knock yourself out."

Her wish sounds literal, but Drakken utilizes his considerable talent for ignoring such things. Those words -_ knocked out_ \- pin more guilt on top of him, and he has to thrash himself out from under it because he can't afford it. Especially when it's unwarranted. He didn't knock Shego out. Warmonga did. Well, if you want to get _extremely_ technical, the monitor did. Either way, it can't be traced back to Drakken. . .

. . . can it?

"It involves the fine art of harnessing Earth's magnetic field in order to turn all kitchen appliances against the homeowners across the globe!" Drakken declares. Rather majestically, if he does say so himself.

Shego flips the magazine up over her face again and turns a glossy page without even tearing the corner, a skill Drakken has always envied her. "So, where did you get _that_ wack idea?"

Drakken stiffens. "If by 'wack,' you mean 'fiendishly brilliant,' then I gleaned it from being attacked by Dr. Freeman's blender and stereo a few years back! If that power was in our hands, imagine the fear! Imagine the mass hysteria! Imagine the mess!"

The magazine lowers, and Drakken sees the ice-skate blade again. "Annnd what if by 'wack,' I _didn't_ mean 'fiendishly brilliant'?"

It is amazing, really. With one torpedo, she can sink all his battleships, shrivel down his arsenal to nothing more than, "Gghhh! Nggk! Shego - bgrg!"

"Yeah. Nice chat." Shego hurls the magazine aside with such violence that it chills Drakken's heart, filling it with reminders of Warmonga's identical arm-fling, only instead of a magazine it was Shego, and he can still see her body slumped among the broken glass. "Later."

Shego stands up and stalks for the hallway. She moves like a deer, a deer with anger in her silent footfalls (hooffalls?). Why did Shego cross over from feisty and fiery to round-the-clock mad, and when, and why is she directing it at him, and how does he fix it? Drakken can't bear to let her get any farther away, not when they are already so distant.

"Stop right there, Shego!" Drakken bellows. "You have not been dismissed yet, and I am the boss, so you're staying! Please!"

He doesn't water down his usual villainous boom any for the last part, but it must stun them both, because Shego spins on her heel back to him and Drakken loses track of where he was in recounting his evil plan. To cover for it, Drakken sinks into his Thinking Chair and crosses his ankles in front of him and ventures, "So. . . how was. . . prison?"

Shego snorts, but what Drakken hears is glass splintering. "Is that your idea of small talk?"

"No!" Drakken says. "It's. . . it's. . . _big_ talk." He bites his suddenly-tremulous lower lip.

"Great." Shego arranges herself on the couch with her limbs all perked up and happy. When she speaks, every syllable seems to be wrapped in marshmallow fluff. "Prison was super-duper. I made a ton of new friends and discovered my inner artistic side through finger-painting exercises."

The unfairness of it strikes Drakken between the temples, along with his own fist. "I _knew_ I should have pretended to be a woman!" he says.

Shego shakes her gush of hair back from her face with a smirk. That's what her hair is reminding him of today, one of those gushers formed when drilling rigs strike oil, and it seems to have gotten bigger in the time he's been away. "We've been apart too long, Doc. You forgot how sarcasm works."

Drakken seizes a grunt before it can slip off his tongue. Why does she always -

_Wait. She admitted it! She acknowledged it, too!_

Drakken dethrones whoever once held the world record for smiling widest - chilly air stings his gumline, and he knows he looks like a complete fool, and he could hardly care less.


	45. Clothes Minded

_45\. Trying to amass the continents into a supercontinent causes earthquakes, apparently. Remember that for next time._

When he was little and he heard cartoon superheroes say, "Another plan bites the dust," Drakken never thought the expression was meant to be taken so _literally_.

All right, so if one wants to be _truly_ literal, the plan, as an intangible thing, has come nowhere near the dust. The newest _lair_ has bit the dust, but again, if one wants to be literal, lairs do not have the mandibles necessary to take bites out of anything -

Well, analogies aside, the lair is kaputski, and there was nothing he could do about it, just as there'd been nothing he could do when his lair-in-a-cube clammed back up into a cube that would never open at his authority again. The incidents are revoltingly similar. Both times he was close enough to establish contact with global domination, the promise of it buzzing in his bones, only to trip over something annoying, something unplanned-for, something totally obscure, and fall from a position of power to one of powerlessness. The only difference is that this time he's not alone. This time his sidekick stands beside him in sneering solidarity, her shoulder firm against his.

These thoughts and others are bobbing in Drakken's mind like so many rubber duckies in a bathtub - _ducks_, he is quick to correct himself, rubber _ducks_ \- as he gazes back at the rubble-remnants of Intercontinental University. It's the first time he's been forcibly ejected from a college, which no one seems to be able to understand right now, and it _still_ doesn't count, because it was a fake university in the first place! Bubbles roll up and down his esophagus, bad bubbles, torrid and sickening.

Kim Possible and her buffoonish boyfriend, last he saw, were left dangling by their fingers from the scaffolding, or whatever you call that big flat ceiling beam across the door. Drakken had called down to her - his boom not a quarter as harsh or thunderous as it should have been, all muffled up with tears or something - that her new mission clothes were _not_, as a matter of fact, all that.

Actually, they are kind of pretty. But she doesn't need to know that. Girls and their need for new clothes. Kim Possible must have _finally_ realized that her first shirt didn't fit her and hadn't fit her since the first day Drakken met her. And they call _him_ unobservant. Stupid.

Loser. That was the one Kim Possible flung at him as she leaped in through a window he never bothered to close because it was eighty feet off the stupid ground.

The word lashes across Drakken's back. Clearly, it's in the same taxonomic group as _bluiser_, the nickname the guys in prison gave him without his consent as they hip-checked him in the lunch line and stepped on the backs of his sneakers so that he'd step out of them because they were too big and then chuckled at the soft, chubby soles of his feet.

Drakken sniffs, valiantly if a little runnily. Suddenly, he can't take it anymore. He has to be in a place without insults, without falling rocks, without danger or fear. He has to be on a planet ruled by him.

Somewhere behind and far beneath him, Intercontinental University still lies smoldering. Drakken can feel the draw back to it, can picture himself executing a Kim-Possible-perfect leap down into the remains, scrambling around to see if there is anything left of his machine to scavenge, if any piece of his dream for Drakkenegea can be salvaged. Only Shego's hand on his arm keeps him in the hovercraft.

Well, no, that's what he'd _like_ to be the case. The truth is, when Drakken glances back at where Intercontinential University once stood, the bitten dust still billows into the air and turns it smoky and hazy, reminding him of cigarettes being puffed in Cell Block D's multipurpose room, fire alarms blaring as Pyro Pete had another one of his episodes, the smell of tobacco clinging to that one guy with the winch-like grip, the guy who always carried a circular, foul-oozing tin around. It took Drakken longer than he wants to admit to realize it was chewing tobacco.

The world becomes hot, then cold. Black spots prance at the edges of Drakken's vision, and he isn't strong enough to swat Shego's hand away. In fact, he shudders, all the way down a spine that's already one big scab of barely-healed hurt.

Drakken rests his chin on the side of the hovercraft and watches Middleton pass below him in a smear of oil paint. The bubbles have fled his throat by now - no doubt terrified of him - and been replaced by what seems to be a thick glob of paste.

"So, boys and girls, here's the million-dollar question." Shego has lowered herself into the driver's seat, fiddling with the controls as if she wants to rip them from their sockets. Her entire body is like one big fireplace poker, every part of her a weapon. "What exactly causes earthquakes?"

"Your mouth," Drakken mutters back in irritation. No, something beyond irritation. Irritation is just a two-dimensional figure compared to the vast plane of whatever he is feeling right now.

Because he _knows_ what causes earthquakes. He's _studied_ plate tectonics, the same as everyone else who ever graduated from Middleton High. If he weren't being goaded into a fury, he could quite easily explain exactly what fault lines are and where they are most likely to be located. Could give a pretty snazzy PowerPoint presentation on the precise standards for every number on the Richter scale, decimals included. He _knows_ it. He's smart enough.

He just was so busy revolutionizing continental drift that he didn't think to think about it -

"Wow. That wasn't even one of the options I was about to give you," Shego says. She widens her flinty eyes. "If _that_'s your answer, no wonder you never graduated coll -"

"Shego!" Drakken lunges forward and seizes the back of the seat, tries to wring it, although its hard plastic mold stands a good chance of winning. His voice sounds as if it's being eaten away by termites. "Stop it, stop it, _stop_ it! If I have to tell you. One! More! Time! that I am a dropout - that they let me in and I let _myself_ out - " he sucks in a breath and the desperation he can tell is practically foaming out of him - "That was a really good retort, too! Why won't you respect it?"

Amusement flares up in Shego's eyes, as if the flint has managed to scrape together a flame. After so many months in the lonesome company of the despicable and loud-mouthed and crude, the sight is as welcome as that first flicker of fire must have looked to. . . to, well, to the ones who discovered it. "Dr. D, have you ever known me to 'respect' anything?"

_Good point. Not as good as mine - though, really, what is?_

"So it's nothing personal?" Drakken asks. The paste in his throat turns from sour to sweet.

Shego swivels away from him, but not before Drakken catches the outline of a smile. "I didn't say _that_," she says.

And then there are times when he can't remember why he missed her at all. Yet he did. He very much did.

Kim Possible called Shego a loser too, Drakken recalls now, and when he checks Shego for symptoms of deflation, he sees none. It hasn't humbled her. Nothing ever humbles her. Even in her unconsciousness, a memory that surfaces in _his_ sleep at least once a night, she has her jaw etched upward in defiance.

Can't go there.

It actually weighs on him _less_ to think about the destruction of Intercontinental University. His latest invention must have shaken itself apart, stopping the earthquakes but not in time to save itself. Or the giant, debonair statue of Drakken in the Thinker pose, or even the baseball bat he was planning to use to clonk Kim Possible over the head, which was the only type of home run a supervillain ever needed to be able to hit. Only she couldn't just come in through the door, oh noooo. . .

Drakken falls back into a crouch against the passenger seat, not quite sitting. It's jarring and hard on his pelvic muscles, but he has the distinct, newly discovered feeling that if his backside actually touches the seat, a trapdoor will open under him and spill him onto the Middleton Freeway, even though that has absolutely never happened before, not once. Plenty of other strange things, sure - but never that.

_He never went to college, did he?_ Drakken hears the buffoon's voice, soaked in scorn it had no right to be soaked in, considering this child couldn't watch the Simian Channel without swooning or keep track of a pair of pants.

Worst of all, the buffoon was _there_ for the Bebe incident. Well, the _second_ Bebe incident. _Bebe Incident Part Two: To Bebe or Not to Bebe?_ That would make a good title. . .

Titles aside, though, the buffoon saw the Bebe incident. Heard Drakken's backstory. Watched him lapse into a crying meltdown that wasn't on the agenda. He _knows_ Drakken is a dropout, he _knows_. How could he say something so idiotic, so cruel, so. . .

_Right. You see how rationally and kindly you can think when someone is threatening to club your girlfriend over the head._

The thought is so odd it must be someone else's, someone with scruples (and a girlfriend, come to think of it), copy-pasted into Drakken's head. Trying to snuff it, though, is like trying to shake a wet cobweb out from between your fingers.

For an instant, Drakken feels as though he has crawled out of his own purple-bruised blue skin and into the buffoon's with its more conventional hue. Limp and useless. Brain separated from the rest of his body. Arms everywhere, not knowing what to do with themselves.

It nearly scares the evildoer right out of him.

The image is completed when Drakken's cell phone chirps and twitches in his pocket. He bursts into giggles, because the buffoon was right about one thing - it _does_ tickle, and it's hard to hold oneself to a manly chortle when all the receptors in one's leg are being tiptoed across at once. It's a surprisingly short tickle, however, which must indicate not a call but one of those newfangled text messages, which Drakken has never entirely understood. Why not just go ahead and _call_ someone since you have your phone in your hand already?

Drakken flips his phone open and stares down at the pixelated letters. It's from Fred, the henchman in change of reconstruction. (Their own _personal_ reconstruction of the lair, not that weird period of American history after the Civil War. How's that for college knowledge?) **I think the lair's done, Boss,** it says.

Unexpectedly, Drakken's fingertips beat a rhythm on the phone's dinged-up screen. **Are u sure?** he sends back, although he probably doesn't need to. Criminal masterminds his henchmen are not, but he does trust them to recognize when a building has all its necessary walls.

Sort of.

**Yup.**

**About time,** Drakken sends back. Someone else's scruples pinch at him, and he adds a smiling emoticon. Because he also can't deny the grin on his own face, nor the warmth that spreads through his chest the way he always imagined characters on television feel when they drink an antidote to a deadly poison. It's so rare these days, so fragile, that Drakken doesn't want to move so much as a pinkie toe for fear of startling it away.

Which is stupid. His state of mind - state of _chest_ \- is not some kind of flighty rabbit creature.

No, this is not at all like the collapse of the lair-in-a-cube. He has Shego. He has the henchmen. And he's not heading off to prison again. He's going home.

_Home?_

His usage of the word pulls Drakken up short, and he wags his head from side to side. Villains have a home _base_, not a home. He hasn't had anyplace he considers home since he went off to college, the college he _voluntarily left, thank you very much!_ There are lairs, some of which implode or are infiltrated or collapse, and then other lairs to move on to. None of them are meant to be cozy. None of them are meant to be home. None of them are meant to bring him comfort that he isn't even supposed to be longing for.

At this point, though, Drakken decides he'll take what comfort he can get. It's not like anyone else has to know. This can be his little secret.

Well, it could be if he wasn't aware that he's still beaming ear-to-ear. His emotional transmitter has a kill switch somewhere, Drakken knows, but he's too far removed from the Dia - from That Night to search very carefully for it.


	46. Odds Man In

_46\. Surplus inventory is not to be eaten! End of story. Period - no, exclamation point!_

It's.

Not.

Fair.

Everything is ruined. His plan to plunge the world into the next Ice Age. His venture into the corporate world. Even his desperate, _perhaps_ not well-thought-out solution to the problem of being saddled with thousands and thousands of extra -

_Ugggggggggggh. I can't even_ think _the word!_

Drakken lifts his head from the arm of the couch - not soft enough tonight, even though it has always been before - and aims a glare at his bubbled-up, treacherous stomach, shielding his view of his feet, as if the toes of his squishy black boots are too hideous to be looked upon. Scientifically, he's not sure he can even prove they're still there. The churning misery beneath his rib cage has numbed all other parts of him. Everywhere he turns, there's a green sea of pain that clashes badly with his lair's decor, which is too deep and wicked a red for the contrast to even form Christmas colors.

Usually during a post-scheme sulk, it helps him to picture the deat - the _successful defeat_ \- of his arch-nemesis, the purple-clad dream-wrecker. Reconfigure the scene of her escape, making her near-miss a no-miss - a _hit_, in other words - and leaving himself the victor. This time, that's not going to help, because this time his doom trap of choice involved lowering her as quickly as he could (those painstaking inches are for villains who _want_ to be defeated) into a boiling, gurgling vat of chocolate ganash, and Drakken doesn't want to think about ganash right now or ever again. He already feels like he's been thrown in himself, drowning in it, and to save his own life had to open his mouth and swallow it all, draining the vat dry. He's certainly boily and gurgly - and gut-stuffed - enough.

Not to mention Kim Possible had brought that little kid with her - the darker-skinned, freckled boy who Drakken had never seen out from behind a screen, and his soft-cheeked innocence is compromising the visual aesthetic of the whole scene! Drakken tries to shove him into a corner, obscure him with racks of baking trays, but he still can't forget the child is there.

He can mess with the scene as much as he wants, though, and it will still be easier than rearranging and re-graphing himself. Drakken hitches, trying to adjust the position of his shoulders. Maybe he will find comfort in an equation with a steeper slope, or at least in not having to stare at the stacks and stacks of empty boxes whose overloaded burdens have been transferred into him. No, that sounds too mild, _transfer_. He _took_ them all, lips parted, teeth chomping as he snarfed them down with the speed of a mechanical reaper -

_Uggggh._

Drakken grips at his temples. Someone is dancing around inside them, wearing those heavy, silver-soled tap shoes. He can't get them out, can't stop the rest of that day from playing out in his head.

Kim Possible's boyfriend showing up and rescuing her, being her knight in shining armor - well, more like her knight in opaque jumpsuit, and why did they have one small enough for him, anyway? Shego lunging for the buffoonish beau, her face both enraged and satisfied, if Drakken was reading it correctly - he was never sure. Slicing a pipe open as she swung for him. Chaos and dust around him as Drakken watched everything he worked so hard to build fell to the earth as though it was never more than cheap, fake scenery for an elementary-school play. When said dust and chaos cleared, Drakken wandered through the rubble of his broken factory, sniffling (_not_ crying, no, not in front of Shego).

It took another two or three hours to realize that the Atmosfreezer must have also been destroyed, and with it his chance of world domination.

(He should have thought of that first, shouldn't he?)

Drakken flips over onto his other side. Well, really, only the upper half of him flips. His belly doesn't jiggle like a bowl full of jelly the way Santa Claus's does - just stays put, standing, anchored in place as though it's weighted down by sandbags instead of - those other things he isn't thinking about. His fingers tighten on the pressure points that pulsate with every mother's favorite aphorism when their child begged for a large Thing-That-Shall-Not-Be-Named and then wasn't able to eat the whole thing: _Someone's eyes are bigger than their stomach._

But Drakken knows they are wrong. Because there's not anyone, anywhere - with the maybe-exception of a giant squid - who has eyes bigger than _his_ stomach. The thought tosses a net of barely-kept-at-bay nausea over him.

Discouragement and despair usually show up and spend the night after a thwarted scheme. In the aftermath of this one, though, they only stuck around for a few hours, and Drakken even allowed himself to wonder if the Atmosfreezer going up in smoke hadn't been a blessing in disguise. Gave him time to focus on his business endeavors. In significantly less explosive surroundings.

And then the company folded.

No, not in the way his lair-in-a-cube folded, wrapping back into itself and tucking the corners in neatly. This was significantly longer and messier, like trying to remove a bandage one pore-ripping peel at a time.

The coal black in the company checkbook turned to red-hot embers that burned away the money in the cash register. (Well, that's what _seemed_ to happen.) Less and less - or is it fewer and fewer? - parents began bringing their children in. Dr. Drakken, who has never liked children, not once in his entire life, began to miss the squeals and the scampering that always came with them. At least they would join him in his excitement, whereas Perkins's face was constantly withering into a prune those days.

Drakken shoves his own face into the sofa cushion, the skin around his scar hot and itchy with fury and regret and sadness and an unprecedented case of indigestion.

He had no choice, then. He had to go back to being evil.

In some magma-deep, microscopic segment of himself, a segment that betrayed every evil trait he worked so hard to cultivate, Drakken would have rather stayed a You-Know-What salesman.

The thought is an interloper, a foreign body that any good brain surgeon could have removed with their hands tied behind their backs. Drakken pictures Ann Possible and heaves out a groan. The reminders just won't quit.

And beneath them an odd, strained scenario plays out. Drakken watches from outside his own self as he pores over every manner of world-domination weaponry known to humankind. Gaping in delight as he skitters back and forth across a long room with an amphitheater ceiling. Not the kind of room he would ever want to leave, Drakken thinks, but now he finds himself abruptly scanning it for doors and windows. And there are none, and claustrophobia barks in his veins, and nothing is right, nothing is safe.

Devising another dastardly plan should have whetted Drakken's appetite. Except he's got no appetite anymore, just the sensation that those cavernous walls are closing in, and he's pretty sure his tongue will never be properly damp again. It feels rough and beaten and cracked like a strip of beef jerky, or maybe one of those old leather belts Richard Lipsky used to wear. Drakken never really went for leather himself - has nothing to do with the fact that it was usually out of his price range, truly - and his own belt is slippery fabric to match the rest of his clothes.

Not that it will do him a whole lot of good right now. It was flung aside several hours earlier, and even if Drakken could remember where he flung it, it surely couldn't stand up to the combined forces of four thousand -

_Thingies_, Drakken quickly thinks. He rests a hand on his rumble-ridden stomach, triggering an angry belch. As if he could have possibly forgotten how unhappy his body is with him. He wishes Shego, the sidekick of the calm hands and caustic reassurance, were here.

And yet he doesn't.

He can't explain it, this desire to crawl back to two months ago and curl up there and stay like a cat in a sunbeam. If it doesn't make sense to a genius mind like his, it will certainly be beyond the scope of a merely above-average one like Shego's. Especially since she was already cheesed off (as the teens say. . . or have said _sometime _in the history of Western civilization) that the plan took so long to go into effect. In fact, if it hadn't been for her not-so-gentle urging - which involved destruction of company property - that plan might still be bundled in some storage closet somewhere, never to see daylight.

It's just that - it's just that -

There were shadows in his You-Know-What store, too, where the light poured in through the windows and hopped off the glass display cases, but none of those shadows were big enough to hide in, and Drakken wasn't drawn to them. He can't get any clearer than that, only knows that in the tinkling of the bell over the door and the rush to retrieve a special order, he knew how it felt to be free.

And now, as he lies here, he knows what it is to be chained to a stake.

Three different manacles, three different failures. All in a row. Bad, good, and well-intentioned. And all because of Kim Possible!

Okay, so he probably can't blame her for the low-carb trend. . .

. . . Except he can! He is sick and he is cross and he is _evil_, doggone it, and he can blame whoever he darn well pleases!

Queasier than ever, Drakken knots his fists at his chest. His usual doubts appear to taunt him - _Would a true evil genius really fail this many times in a row?_ they hiss.

_Of course he would! Well, he could,_ Drakken retorts immediately. After all, didn't it take Thomas Edison some ten thousand tries to find a suitable filament for his incandescent bulbs? Didn't the Slinky get invented by accident? Didn't Beethoven go deaf trying to perfect his own music?

Well, he's not sure about that last one, but the other two are definite _yes_es. It should soothe his ragged reaches for air. Instead, the doubts fall back and regroup, mutating into something far grislier than even Drakken knows how to fashion.

He tried doing something non-evil. And it started off so well, a shipment of hope that got to run its way back and forth in Drakken's mental mail room, only to be yanked away from him again -_ Ha-ha! Just kidding!_

Boy, how familiar does _that_ sound?

It's the story of his life. Make that the song of his life - one of those blasted songs that loops around on itself and will not stop until the end of time.

Failure. Failure. Failure everywhere.

Last time he sprinted to the bathroom to puke - well, as much as a man can sprint when his legs are skewed sideways, displaced by the swelling they're trying to evenly distribute - he almost couldn't identify the blue quivering line in the mirror. He was a washed-out, wrung-out, limp version of the supervillain he claimed to be, as if he were just _drakken_ with a lowercase _d_. He _looks_ like a lowercase _d_, a little stick of a thing with a bulge out in front.

Drakken frantically rummages for his ego. At this moment, though, when he thinks of himself, he thinks of a smell - the type of smell that clings to Smarty Mart's seafood counter by the end of the workday, brackish and briny. It's probably just from the sweat that drips down the sleeves of his sweatsuit to pool in his elbow creases, but he can't shake it.

Big round droplets of moisture cruise out of Drakken's eyes. They're the first things all night to come out of him without a convulsion and, therefore, his favorites.


	47. Stop Team Go

_47\. Keep better track of your sidekick. Shego's presence is vital to just about everything - and do NOT let her see this!_

Dr. Drakken picks up a butter knife, the kind that can't harm you even if you forget you're holding it, and hums a tune - a catchy ditty that was in his head when he woke up and has spent the rest of the morning with him. For some reason, it is a spirit-lifter rather than an annoyance as he slices strawberries onto his corn flakes. Donuts and chocolate-chip pancakes aren't options today, and haven't been since what he's come to ruefully refer to as The Cupcake Incident.

It's not an effort to get back into shape. His GI tract took care of that on its own, purging every last crumb and rendering him hollower than he was before. He just can't look at anything rich without his stomach shuddering and threatening a very real uprising.

Feet swinging just a few inches above his floor's wood finish, Drakken pats his cereal down with his spoon and rustles through the newspaper until he finds the funnies, getting a special kick out of the _Corporate Comedy_ strip - "Constructive criticism is very valuable," the boss says, "for everyone _below_ me on the corporate ladder." Whoever wrote this must have known Hank Perkins for sure.

After breakfast, Drakken paces back and forth in front of his giant security monitor, glancing at the door with every turn, willing it to open and sweep Shego in. In the last twenty-four hours, he has come up with the most brilliant hiding spot ever for a Doomsday device, and he can't even attempt to be still until he's shared it with her. Along with the fact that he remembers it's "most brilliant" and not "brilliantest."

He still hasn't entirely recovered from her disappearance last week, from the days and days with only the dubious assistance of his henchmen to rely on, and from the strange sensation that the darkness of the lair could have turned on him at any moment. Every turn that goes by without her at that door stabs yet another needle into some unknown, intangible part of Drakken's anatomy that he decides to refer to simply as a "haystack," since needles and haystacks go well together, at least in wise old sayings.

At last - at long, _long_ last! - there's a knock on the door that jump-starts Drakken's arms and legs as they flail him forward. With his blood cells cartwheeling inside him, he presses the entrance panel and the door splits in two. Shego stands there, a silvery-gray bag hooked over her shoulder.

"Shego!" Drakken greets her. "Ah, you're here at last! I have come up with my _most brilliant_" - he can't stop his hands from wiggling as he weights those words - "scheme yet, and I know you're just dying to hear it!" There's a bit of a squeal to it, and he works on tempering it down to something more sophisticated, something that better matches the tapping of her shoes across the entryway.

Shego points her gaze at him. "Hi, Shego, how was your weekend?" she says.

It's such a bizarre thing for her to say, and he frowns at her. "Um, I suppose it was fine, but that's hardly relevant, and I'm not the one named Shego."

"Drakken - "

"There! You got it right that time!" Drakken says encouragingly.

"What I was _trying_ to do was remind you of some basic common courtesy." Shego lets her bag ker-thunk to the floor. It has little beaded stones on it, and not the kind tacky-glued on, either. The light refracts from their inward curves, dazzling his concentration until there is not much left.

Courtesy? Since when does Shego care about courtesy? She can insult an entire auditorium full of people with a single carefully honed smart remark.

"Is that what you want me to ask you, then?" Drakken says. He feels as if he's trying to balance on one leg, the way she always does without the slightest struggle.

The sharp-angled face that looks back at him couldn't communicate _Duh_ more clearly if it were stamped onto her cheeks. In fact, that would probably be _less_ clear - he mentioned the concentration being shot? Herding letters is beyond its scope when it blurs like that.

"Fine, then," Drakken says, and it almost comes out a growl. "Hi, Shego. How was your weekend?"

Apparently the question deserves nothing more than a shrug, because that's what he gets. "It was all right. Still too cold for the beach, so I just went shopping."

A-ha! Drakken identifies a chance to make connections and lunges for it. "Is that where you got your new bag?" he asks.

Shego squints at him. "Dr. D, I've had that bag for two years."

"Oh." Drakken knows a blush is rising, and he tries to swat it out of the way. In order to maximize its efficiency, his genius brain tends to strain out all facts not directly related to world domination. There may, just _may_ be a chance his brain misjudged on this one. "Oh, no matter. What matters is that I've come up with a mind-boggling scheme that shall redefine what it means to be cunning!" He turns to Shego, rocking on his heels because the excitement is almost too much to contain. "Where's the last place you'd expect to find a doom ray?"

Shego rolls her eyes back as if trying to inspect her hair. "Dr. D, people don't expect to find doom rays _anywhere_."

"Kim Possible does," Drakken says. He punches his chin in her direction to punctuate his retort. "And the last place she would go to look for one is. . ." He pauses, one, two, three, four, and - now. ". . . the bottom of the ocean!" The plan comes fountaining out of him as soon as he lets that first drop go. "My latest doom ray shall rest safely undetected in the Mariana Trench! Of course, it will have to be constructed from material hardy enough to withstand the eight or so tons of water pressure down there, so it looks like we'll need to outsource from the Criminal Headquarters of Aquatic Supervillainy. . . "

Nothing from Shego.

"And that's what _I_ was doing this weekend, while you were _shopping_!" Drakken finishes with a harsher boom tham he intends. But he can pretend it was all part of the scheme. No, it was all part of the scheme, and his body picked up on it before his conscious mind did, which is really saying something. . .

Drakken leans forward, staring Shego straight-on so he can press his authority and status as the boss into her rebelliousness. She looks back, and for just a second, he could swear there's something excessively smooth and neat in her eyes that reminds him of those hasty, discolored paint jobs in movie theater bathrooms, where some kid thought he was so clever to scratch in obscenities with a pencil. Something whose prime directive is to conceal.

For a moment, Drakken is lost in envy. _His_ anguish always exposes itself in black rings around his eyes, grinding teeth, and raw cuticles - at least _those_ he can hide beneath his gloves.

Anguish. Is that what Shego's feeling now? For the first time, Drakken wonders from a place outside of his pickle craving where she was when she wasn't here and _kept_ not being here.

Some cold, invisible shadow creeps up on Drakken from behind and wraps him up into a hug every bit as joint-jarring as his mother's. He barely recognizes it from the day when he discovered Shego had a family - a family she doesn't like but couldn't betray, a family she never told him about, a family that operates in a sphere entirely separate from his and thinks Shego belongs there, too. Before he can even ponder what he's about to blurt, he's blurted it - "Is everything okay, Shego?"

"Why do you ask?" Shego says.

"Because you're acting really. . . weird lately!" He meant to express that more gently.

"Says the man with the stick of celery behind his ear. It doesn't look fresh, either."

Drakken dissolves into a nervous laugh that startles them both, him more than Shego, he can tell. "Oh, that's where that went! It's from yesterday. I was going to have a midnight snack before I went to bed, so I took some celery, but it didn't taste very good by itself, so I went to get some peanut butter, only I wasn't sure if my stomach was up for peanut butter yet - "

A noise drifts out of Shego. If she were anyone except Shego, he might think she was trying not to cry.

And if it were anyone except Shego, he might not care.

"See?" Drakken points an emphatic finger her way. "You're sighing now!"

"Dr. D, everybody who's around you for longer than two minutes sighs," Shego snaps back.

The insult sticks, but not by lodging between the panels of his ego as it usually does. It disappears into uncharted territory, and it hurts so bad that he can't find it.

"No, something's going on with you!" Drakken declares. "Why don't you let me be your head shrink and figure it out?"

"That might be your worst idea yet," Shego says - mildly, but with her fingers flexed in front of her. She's not getting out of this, though. He won't _let_ her.

Drakken drops into his Thinking Chair, exchanges a clipboard for the celery, which he disposes of in the nearest trash receptacle, a squatty can with red stripes zigzagging down its circumference. A pencil rests teasingly on the end table beside him, and Drakken makes a dive for it, taking the brunt of its corner in the shin. He responds in a professional manner - with a yelp, but a deep, _professional_ yelp.

No answer from Shego. Drakken blinks into the silence, and all of his emotions tangle together and go into warp drive before he can sort out where one ends and the next begins. He likes quiet when he's in the planning stage of a scheme, but now it's Sharing Time, and there is supposed to be a lively dialogue! It's like turning on the radio and finding nothing but itchy static. While driving through the woods. At night.

"Come on, Shego. I _did_ take psychology, after all." _That_ shudder digs all the way down, as if prospecting for bone marrow. He took psychology right before all Diablo broke loose.

_Breathe. Breathe, breathe, breathe._

Drakken pulls a pretend pair of the spectacles he discarded after dropping out of college down his nose and peers at Shego over the top of their imaginary lenses. She's gripping her temples with the insides of her fingers - not the tips, not with the blades and all - and below that rests a dark scowl. _Literally_ dark, thanks to her chosen brand of lipstick. At least, he thinks it's lipstick that does it. . .

He thinks back to the time Shego was able to psychoanalyze him. The night with the storm - with the thunder that just wouldn't _stop_, kept coming back for encores no one asked for - when she asked him questions probably more out of boredom than anything else, and he gave her answers that he didn't realize were true until they came tumbling out of him. She can snap him open as easily as she popped the lid off that pickle jar, but Drakken could - and likely will - conquer the world without ever knowing what is inside Shego.

That thought deserves to be shaken out of his head, and Drakken is happy to do so._ There's no room for discouraging thoughts on your To-Do list, _Perkins used to say, although in light of his betrayal, his words seem puny. Cheap, like one of those plastic squirt guns that shatters the first time it slips from your grasp. Ten or twelve more hard shakes, and Drakken can't even remember what he's about to give himself whiplash disagreeing with.

At this point, he likes it better that way.

Drakken's pen wiggles excitedly across the paper spread across his clipboard, wiggles out Shego's name. He has handwriting worthy of the doctorate he never officially earned, Drakken notes with pride. "So, Miss Shego. How would you describe your current state of my mind?" he begins. For a moment, he considers wedging in his best psychiatrist-accent, but that always comes out somewhere in the vicinity of German, and that makes him think of Dementor, and neither one of them needs that right now.

Nary a second passes before Shego replies, "Disgusted." Her upper lip springs back as if to prove it.

Drakken nods and sagely strokes his pencil across the beard he doesn't have. "And how long would you say you have felt this way?" he says, purposefully ignoring the fact that that would make a great beginning line of a song.

"As long as I can remember." Shego's voice bites each word off at the roots, clean and crisp with nothing behind it.

He and Shego never seem to want to chat at the same times. If it weren't for all the scientific evidence to the contrary, Drakken just might believe they're two separate species.

_Confound_ her! Drakken grips the pencil tighter, the lead - graphite, that is - sliding between his fingers. How dare she make him care about her and then duck all his questions? How _dare_ she?

Shego watches him with her arms clamped in a fold. Just another set of barred doors he needs to somehow disable without activating the security system. And he always needs her help for those. He puts the pencil back to her diagnostic sheet and adds eight question marks and an exclamation point.

"Yes," Drakken says at last with a nod. "And what do you think may be causing that state of mind?"

Shego takes a step toward him. The top of the Thinking Chair and the top of her rise to about the same height, and Drakken wishes she'd sit down. "Um, maybe because the entire world is stupid?" she says.

Oh, yes. Definitely a different species. A species with pale green hoarfrost in place of skin.

A species he can't show he fears. The sadness and the anger try to disentangle themselves, and they just can't.

Drakken looks up from the paper. "Are you stressed, Shego?" he ventures.

Shego's expressionless expression doesn't change. "Me? Nooooooo, why would I be stressed?"

Okay, he's not so befuddled (Drakken's absolute favorite way of saying "confused") that he doesn't recognize sarcasm when he hears it. She _is_ stressed.

Drakken bounces his eraser off the Thinking Chair's arm, plump and firm as a hot dog; it isn't the type of chair that greedily devours every object left unattended on its cushions - another reason he loves it so. He dons another frown, a thoughtful one, and it doesn't pinch as much to wear it. "What would you say is the biggest stresser in your life, Shego?" he says, and _ooh_, it's the most like a radio talk show host doctor he's _ever_ sounded. Mother would be so proud!

For a moment, Shego lifts her head and scans the lair's ceiling, and for that same moment, Drakken believes she will answer him because it's such an authentic, un-composed move. And then she says, "Well, there's my boss - Dr. Drakken. He's a pain."

_Strike! Or foul! Or whatever it's called in sports!_

"I mean, for one thing, he barks orders at me all the time. And whenever things don't go his way, he throws a massive temper tantrum. Plus, he's super-needy and can't do a THING for himself." Shego sniffs. "Just for starters."

Every sentence is punctuated, not by a period or an exclamation point, but by a barb that nestles at least three layers deep into his feelings. Drakken squeezes the pencil so hard his knuckles pop - or maybe that's the graphite - and turns his most wounded, most scandalized look to her. He will refute that, he will counter every one of her points, except his throat needs to be oiled before it will let anything other than a long, seething grunt escape. He sees the black-smudged areas beneath his eyes piling into bunches as they always do when he's upset.

Shego alternates between watching him and examining the cracks in the floor that announce the presence of a shark tank beneath. Geographically, she is much too close to him, but psychologically, she is much too far away. Another barb twitches on her lips. "So, you got a diagnosis for me yet?" she says.

Drakken glares up at her through what seems to be a thick choke of smoke between them. The comparison makes him picture soldiers in mud-trenches, craning their necks above ground every few minutes to see if the enemy is gaining on them, a picture that wads up inside him, another knot. Shego isn't an enemy. She is an ally - a hostile ally, if there is such a thing. And she should be crouched in _his_ trench, with Drakken, covering him and once in a rare while, when she is caught off guard and he has a Doomsday device at the ready, letting him cover for her.

A tempo starts in Drakken's eardrums, hot and clanging. He remembers Shego clutching her temples. Is there any way that she has this going on inside her, too, and her wiseacre routine is just a Halloween costume for it? A really, really immaculate costume with no seams or tears visible? Drakken finds himself close to smiling at the idea.

He takes a moment to practice, to oil his throat with several dozen swallows, before he speaks in the smooth, deliberated manner he has been working on as of late, because he understands that spewing out facts makes him seem more overloaded CPU than formidable foe. "Yes. I think you're lonely, Shego," he says.

"Lonely?" Shego's eyebrows knife together, which is almost as scary as a green-glowing hand or a body tensed to pounce.

Drakken gasps a mouthful of eraser crumbs down his windpipe, requiring several brutal fits of hacking to clear it. Shego doesn't appear particularly impressed. At least she doesn't try to give him the Heimlich or anything, probably because she's smart enough to know that coughing equals breathing. Drakken reminds himself of that - he _is_ breathing, as useless as the air he's taking in feels.

If she's that mad, does that mean he's very, very, wrong - or very, very right?

"Yes," he says again once he's able. "And I would prescribe - getting a dog!"

"A _dog_?" Shego repeats, as if he has recommended adopting an entire colony of free-range fire ants. Actually, she'd probably like those better.

Drakken nods. "Like Commodore Puddles."

Commodore Puddles trots into the front hallway - must have been drawn by the sound of his name, the smart little pup. He prances back and forth between Drakken and Shego, toenails clicking. His tail wiggle-waggles, quick and hopeful, as he looks up at Drakken, and it warms a chamber of Drakken's heart that he really should try harder to keep hidden.

"See?" Drakken gestures down to his splendid, panting poodle. "It's simply marvelous to walk in the front door, and have someone be so happy to see you! Jumping on you, dancing in circles, drooling, trying to lick your face, making you feel like the most vital person on the face of the planet - "

Shego turns a palm upward. The twitch still perches there, ready to be launched, but the hornet-stinger look to it has faded. It's. . . gentler now. Not gentle. But gentle_r_.

"What do I need a dog for?" Shego says. "I've already got _you_."

With that, she turns and walks away, the swish of her footfalls disturbing the relative quiet less than the swish of his pencil across the paper. Drakken stands there, bewildered and interrupted and a score of other things that can't explain the grin poking its way through like a mole peering out of its tunnel.

That might just be the nicest thing she's ever said to him.


	48. Cap'n Drakken

**~Entering the home stretch now, guys! Thanks to everyone who's been reading. :)~**

_48\. You can't prepare for everything. But things work out in the end. . . usually. . . don't they?_

_He's drowning again._

_Not in a formidable ocean this time. Not in a swift-flowing river or a deep lake. Not even in a pond, which would still be a feasible, if embarrassing, way to meet your end._

_No, this time he is surrounded by a thick, black substance, tar-like and yet corrosive. Fantastic if he were able to scrape it onto a slide and slip it beneath a microscope lens. Far less so when it rushes up his nostrils and into his sinuses, down his throat and into his lungs, where it multiplies, spreads, _infests _him._

_He tries to do what everyone else on the planet would do, yell for help, but thin sutures of the substance hold his lips closed. And when he thrashes and swings, he hits only emptiness that still manages to sting where he connected with it. He is in a world without the laws of physics, a world where his substantial brainpower has been neutralized._

_That's when the laugh starts from beside him - a laugh without bottom, without limits, without mercy. Its cold notes plunk to the ground, one by one, like a pile of bricks, and with each one, an identical brick of fear drops onto Drakken. It shouldn't be happening this way. Laughs shouldn't have brute strength lurking behind them._

_"I will take it!" slinks out around the laughter. "I will take it all! Everything you think you have taken for yourself - it all goes straight to _me_!" Its cruelty crawls toward him, and he instinctively knows that if it should reach him, it and the spiraling, spitting darkness inside him, the person his mother loved will never again emerge._

_As its first touch blisters his flesh, he -_

\- bolts upright, and he screams. And screams. And screams.

But how, when his lips are stitched shut?

Except they aren't. Drakken lifts a hand to them and finds them dripping with sweat and raw-gnawed, but intact and mobile. And he can _feel_ things here. Not good things - his belly going through the spin cycle, and his contacts burning as they rub his retinas. Still, it's enough to cement him in reality.

The reality where he has yet to conquer the world. The reality where it's the middle of the night, and Shego isn't here to set things right. The reality where he only climbed into bed because the old plot-well has run pretty dry, and sometimes unusual geniuses receive inspiration through dreams.

Yes, sometimes they do. And sometimes. . . _this_ happens, instead.

It sure seemed like that dream was sending him a message, but it did so via a bunch of abstractions that cry out for translation. The thought of deciphering them is far too similiar to being a college kid and taking a chemistry test where you're counted off for spelling. Or being asked to explain just _what_ makes a painting pretty, when you could just point to it and anyone who isn't legally blind can figure it out for themselves!

Drakken glances down at his legs and releases another scream. Some red _thing_ is wrapped around them, strangling him, like that carnivorous mutant octopus he almost fed James Possible to, all of his misdeeds come back to haunt him.

Wheezing in dry air, Drakken kicks and flails his legs free of its clutches. The carniverous mutant octopus lets go without a fight, which is surprisingly submissive for a carniverous mutant octopus. Suspicion piqued, Drakken leans in to take a closer look and discovers it is, in fact, his own bedsheets. Must have gotten tied up in his less-than-restful sleep.

Drakken wipes his forehead and tries to chuckle, but receives little cooperation from his body. A low-pitched keening comes out instead - the sound of a vampire bat being tortured, if he had to guess. Strange, his powers of observation are usually - all right, not as impeccable as he would prefer, but certainly not this. . . _peccable_, either.

Everywhere else in the world - well, everywhere else in the Northern Hemisphere, Drakken corrects himself - it is spring, but here in the lair the thermostat is set to winter-frigid all year 'round. Perfect scheme-brooding atmosphere. He blinks, surprised that frost doesn't crust his lashes.

It has now been four days since he awoke to Kim Possible holding his head above water. Drakken knows that for an indisputable fact, even though he usually has trouble keeping track of time. He knows because he remembers each individual sunset, how he watched it, dreading the night it dragged behind it, the night that used to be a close personal friend of his.

Four days since the world broke, and he doesn't have a single evil plot to show for it.

At first, right after the blackout ended, Drakken tried to assume the best - that the world was his, any muss or fuss handily deleted from his memory banks. But as the next few minutes unfolded, it became agonizingly obvious that he hadn't taken over the world, just somehow lost a day-and-a-half of his life. Enough time to change his clothes. And wake up in an ocean the color of Mars dust.

The only other time he had a gap this big in his memory was the day he got his wisdom teeth out as a senior in high school. When he surfaced from the wavy-edged haze, Mother told him he'd begged "that nice lady at the counter" for an "A+ patient" sticker, which featured a star remembering to brush - brush _what_, Drakken couldn't tell you - and stamped it proudly on the corner of his desk. Horrified, he ran to peel it off. Off it came, but it left behind this sticky residue no amount of saliva-shining could remove.

That's what he's feeling right now. The residue.

_Fascinating_, Drakken can almost hear some college professor purring at him. _Please explain this symbolism to the class._

Why is it he must always be called upon to explain things he doesn't know how to, and then every time they get to something he _wants_ to explain, is _dying_ to explain, everyone tells him to shut up?

In spite of the chill, his silky-smooth jammies have turned slippery with perspiration. The giant monitor perpendicular to the foot of his bed gazes down at him, a rectangular cyclops, and Drakken knows beyond a doubt that, as much as he adores his giant soft bed, he will throw up if he spends another second in it.

Drakken catapults himself off the mattress and hurries back and forth across his room in a moaning, gasping tumble of energy, scarcely making barefoot contact with the floor, zigzagging between his closet and his shelves of science manuals. His bedroom is large but dozens of also-large objects crowd it, creating narrow spaces between walls and bookcases and television screens. Two or three laps around it winds him in a way it didn't use to, and he has to pause and prop himself against the laboratory desk he keeps in every room for those moments when impulsive geniuis strikes.

He looks at his shaking, near-gaunt arm. _Glares_ at it, actually.

If the laws of universal human experience broke in his favor, he wouldn't have asked any questions. Wasn't polite to examine a gift horse's oral hygiene too closely, after all. But the fact that it conspired with every other natural force in the world to foil his schemes - he can almost feel his fingers running over his childhood desk and jamming to a stop in the tacky patches that kept it from being the pristine surface it was made to be.

Drakken lifts those same fingers and probes - scientifically, clinically - at the non-hole in his right ear, where he'd pulled the pierced earring free. At least it _would_ be a scientific, clinical probe if it weren't for the shudder that encompasses his entire framework, which seems to be mostly composed of bone these days. In the rattling-around, Drakken tries to pry free the section of his brain set aside for _conniving_, takes a mental crowbar to it.

Nothing. If anything, it tightens itself down even more stubbornly. Maybe it came bundled together with his understanding of how he would up in the ocean, and now they're both gone, as if someone has scrubbed his gray matter with a _different_ strain of Brainwashing Shampoo, one that rinsed away memories rather than willpower. In place of the usual sickening squirm of knowing he should have done something different, BBs of pain shoot through Drakken's chest.

BBs. Bebes. His first, worst robots. His greatly improved versions who were too smart for their own good - or maybe just for _his_ good - who plotted to overthrow him even as he poured his heart to James and Bob Chen and Professor Ramesh.

That plan was marvelous, if - Drakken can admit it now, three years later - a trifle shallow. Prove himself to his old posse. Show them how badly their mockery had wounded him. Make them regret every single hurtful word they ever said to him. All good goals, yes, but he didn't really have anything planned beyond the moment they realized their mistakes and apologized to him. Maybe make them scrub his lair's toilets was about as far as he'd thought. He had such a strong thesis statement that he just expected the rest of the essay to fall into place around it.

Ah, yes, continuing with the college metaphor. Appropriate.

In the end, it hadn't mattered. James's hard yank of the invitation from Drakken's hand - he forgot how _strong_ James can be. The Bebes turning against him, leaving him literally surrounded by enemies. And even as he scrambled to understand how such an uprising was possible in the brains he built for them, to save himself, three masculine guffaws - guffaws Drakken can still hear in the night, if he listens hard enough. Their laughs were fearless, but he's never heard a more cowardly sound.

And for the first time in his life, Drakken hadn't just wanted to toss someone to his sharks for convenience's sake. Rage hardened his arteries and went off in little fireworks behind his eyes, red-white-blue. Nothing else remained of the room except him and these men who kicked the ashes of his hope and sniggered about it. He yearned to tear James limb from limb with his own underwhelming hands.

Drakken's knees buckle - what a strange phrase - and now the rungs of the chair are the only things standing between him and the floor. He's never been this weak before in his _life_. Unnaturally weak, like the little kid at the end of that horror movie _Evicting Evil_. Which has never made much sense to Drakken, because wouldn't it be much more exhausting to hold some kind of evil spirit inside than have it leave?

Why does he suddenly get goose bumps on his _scalp_?

Drakken pushes himself upright, wobbling on legs that didn't use to creak beneath him, and limps back over in the direction of his bed. It gapes, open and dark, the sheets drooling down at the foot of it, ready to devour him. An electric-type bolt goes through Drakken, and he rocks away from it. A splinter of moonlight catches on the huge screen then, allowing Drakken a glimpse of his reflection - mouth aquiver, cheeks blanched, chest heaving in and out.

Not exactly a great likeness of a supervillain.

He looks and feels like he has forgotten to wear his long johns on a day with a zero high, looks and feels ragged and exposed without his. . . his ego? No, even as he stands there, shivering under his nice warm pajamas, he doesn't doubt his brilliance or resilience. .. and he hasn't lost his knack for obscure rhymes, either, apparently. So what is he missing?

_Bravado_. Drakken can't remember the last place he heard the term. Probably from a police officer, upon one of his many arrests. It meant - as far as he could suss out - a sort of counterfeit courage, used when your emotional finances couldn't splurge on the real deal. Underneath is. . . not cowardice, not exactly, but certainly something that would lead Jack Hench to disbar him from villainhood if he ever got a whiff of it.

Drakken casts his gaze away from the screen, unable to bear the shame any longer. Eddy, Hank Perkins, and that flirtatiously fickle DNAmy have already failed him as allies, yet he always thought if nothing else, he could depend on an alliance with him_self_.

Now he's not so sure.

Drakken tries to lean back and rest on his heels, a movement that lands him back-first on his bed, his bleak stare directed at the ceiling.

It's time to face the facts. Trying to squeeze out a plan these last few days has been like trying to get blood from spinach, or water from a turnip, or some other vegetative impossibility. He was saved by his arch-foe - which in itself is nothing new, but the feeling that he owes her something is as foreign to him as wasabi. (Even in good Japanese restaurants, it's usually just green-dyed horseradish. Most people don't know that.) He's been at this for over twenty years, and the night he came the closest is in the running for Worst Night Of His Life.

Brilliant and resilient as he is, his life has become a YouTube video, buffering and buffering but never managing to load anything of substance. And he is the figure in his own nightmares.

Or is he?

Drakken bites down on his thumbnail, hears it crack off at the tip, coughs out the little shard before he can breathe it back in. He pictures himself as the main character in a video game, creeping armed around dark corners, not having encountered any little enemies in a while, knowing he is overdue and it can only mean a confrontation with The. . . Big One. (The _boss_ is what the teens today call it, he learned in his forum-chatting time on the 'Net.) As skilled a player as he is, any gambler with a lick of sense would bet on him. But the fact he remains that he doesn't have a monopoly on frightfulness.

And it's strange how. . . _frightful_ that is.


	49. The Mentor of our Discontent

_49\. No team-ups with former cellmates! No matter how adoring and full of great ideas they may seem!_

If only Lucre were giving him the cold shoulder.

The "silent treatment," that is, because Drakken doesn't really care one way or another about the temperature of Lucre's scratchy-sweatered shoulders. But nooo. The guy keeps hammering and hammering - well, Drakken thinks the term might actually be "yammering," but all he can see is a line of nails being driven, one by one, into his poor defenseless skull - for the whole ride to the police station, the whole process of being booked and fingerprinted, and the long walk down a hallway that is probably meant to shame them.

"Gosh, this is only my second time being arrested," Lucre says. "Well, if you don't count that time back in college when the cops busted up our study party. It turned out a couple of the guys weren't really studying the fermentation process. Well, they _were_, but not in the way they said they were - "

The door locks with terrible finality behind the amused-looking policeman. Now Drakken is sharing a holding cell with Frugal Lucre and a larger guy whose cursing graffities the air.

And it's Lucre's hammer-yammering that unnerves him more. If it doesn't stop soon, a whole lot of foul things are going to come winging out of the dark closets in Drakken's mind where he stores them away. Listening to Lucre blather while Drakken puked his throat raw. The sound of Lucre's laughter at his own unfunny jokes as Drakken tried not to breathe in the scent of aftershave and deodorant feverishly working to overcome secondhand smoke. Hearing Lucre yelp - it _must_ have been Lucre's yelp, the sound _far_ too wimpish to have come from Drakken's manly vocal cords - when yet another man bashed yet another table corner into Drakken's side, adding yet another bruise to his already-impressive collage of them.

In less time than it took to locate the Stockbot Master Remote, they will be transferred back to Cell Block D. Home of the unpalatable food, the public toilets, and the company of men who make Graffiti Mouth over there sound like a Boy Scout.

_Home disgusting home._

Drakken tries to give the thought a sardonic flip the way he's heard Shego do, but even in its immaterial state, it quivers back and forth in his head. He's lower in vitality than he was before the Disappeared Day in the ocean, and he spent it all at Smarty Mart - an ironic turn of phrase, Drakken realizes. The shelf he's formed with his chin is in danger of collapsing, and to his horror, his mucus production has increased. If he lets it drizzle out, he will be branded a bawler for sure, and he'll be done for. They'll stuff his head into a toilet and flush it - the toilet, not his head - and knowing the exact amount of water pressure swirling around him will count for absolutely nothing.

An invisible weight presses down on Drakken's wrists, even though the cuffs were taken off twenty minutes ago. It, along with the specters of every other time he's ever been touched, press in on him, flow thick through him, all but saying, _Ooooooooohhhhhoooo_. He's already threatened Lucre's life if the man lays another hand on him - the good old unfinished, "Touch me again and so help me I'll - " because Drakken can't really think of how to complete it. _Jerk away_ is probably most truthful, but how is that a threat?

It isn't.

A rock pings off the bars of the window, and Drakken jerks away from _that_. Great. Now Kim Possible has probably shown up to actually throw accuser's stones at him, even though he didn't _do_ anything to her today, unless you count commanding the Stockbots to grab her and hoist her into the air. Which Drakken _doesn'_t, because she did the same thing to him not long afterward, and he can testify that it doesn't even _hurt_. And those robots weren't even humanoid enough to be creepy the way the Bebes were. He's come quite a way since his Bebe-days. He doesn't have the stomach for it anymore.

Literally. His belly is a treacherous place to be as it is.

"Hey, Clueless, over here," someone says by the window.

It's a woman's voice, one Drakken recognizes even before he whirls back toward the window and looks up into a mask of disdain. It doesn't matter, though, because her hands are also out, lit by plasma. For a second, Drakken thinks maybe it is a mirage, fashioned by six months of waiting in Cell Block D, waiting to see her face at the hole punch of a window, where it never showed up. But if she were a mirage, he would have conjured her looking at him more kindly.

"Shego!" The name begs to be screamed, but Drakken has to settle for squeezing it tightly out, straining his gums.

Shego motions for him to get back, and when Drakken doesn't right away, she swings her plasma forward anyway. Drakken jumps in his boots and scrambles to stand back against the opposite wall as Shego slices through the bars as if they're made of dough.

Lucre's jaw practically dangles to the ground. Graffiti Mouth is stunned swearless.

Drakken doesn't waste any more time with them. He hurtles toward the window and slips into the hole, a narrow one that still gapes on either side of him. Man, he _has_ lost weight.

"Is _he_ coming?" Shego jerks a thumb in Lucre's direction.

"No!" Drakken snaps without hesitation.

Lucre sags like wet paper mache.

The thought of Lucre tracking along behind them, continuing his monologue about his college years, as if anybody wants to hear about those, is enough to skewer Drakken where he lies, half in and half out. But, if nothing else, he makes a handy scapegoat - it's _Lucre_ who failed today, not Drakken - and for that, Drakken decides to grant him something.

"You can escape if you want," Drakken says. "But don't come chasing us down, or we'll - we'll -"

"We'll make sure you regret it," Shego says.

"Yes! That! Exactly!" Why, oh, why couldn't he think of that before? Drakken turns to Graffiti Mouth, who has recovered enough to jeer at him, and adds, "I always forget the English word for that."

It always works so well for Dementor.

Drakken rolls the rest of himself through the hole, managing not to cry out - at least, not above ten decibels - when his leg scrapes the cinder blocks beneath. He drops to the ground beside Shego, finds one last sample of vitality, and stretches it in a sprint across the blacktop to the hovercraft, where he has to stop and wheeze for air that doesn't come as easily as it used to.

While he guzzles oxygen down, Shego slips herself into the driver's seat and flicks the ignition to life. She's wearing her jumpsuit again, the wig-and-dress costume gone, as if it never happened. Maybe it never did. Maybe after the Disappeared Day, his brain is simply trying to reach its monthly quota of memories by manufacturing fake ones.

The idea of that, along with the very real fact that he no longer knows every nook and cranny in his own brain, keeps Drakken sullen and staring at the skyline as Shego pilots them home, answering only with grumbles when Shego glances at him sideways and says, "So how was your playdate with Lucre?" Such a comedian, his sidekick.

Upon returning home, Drakken makes for his Thinking Chair and drops into it - the way pianos drop onto sidewalks in cartoons. Shego, however, stays standing, levels her entire forehead at him, and says, "Dr. D, we gotta talk."

Uh-oh.

He knows that tone. It's the same one Mother used when she found out that he was skipping meals in order to contribute his lunch money to the _Buy Drew a Chemistry Set_ Fund. It's bad, bad news.

Still, Drakken collects himself nicely, crossing his knees together. At the very least, he can send the first dart her way, begin the conversation on his terms. "Ah, yes, of course. And what shall you be mocking me for today?"

"Nothing," Shego says, and Drakken nearly falls off the Thinking Chair. Her body is so stiff he expects to hear it crack and crunch as she turns her neck his direction. They have gone to someplace colder than mocking, someplace the sun will never touch and melt. "This isn't mocking. This is a serious discussion about whether or not you MEANT to objectify me."

"Object...i...fy?" Drakken has to run it through his speech processor, and he frowns at the unfairness of the setup. "Shego, you know that I don't understand all of your obscure grammar terms!"

"It's not about grammar. It's about attitude."

"What attitude?" Drakken rises into a half-sit and glowers at her. "I don't have an attitude! You're the one with the -"

Shego cuts him off with a swish of her hands, which even plasma-less is enough to shut him up before he can say '_tude_ (the very latest in teenage slang). "Why'd you send me to Martin Smarty's office?"

Hmmm. Shego doesn't usually ask questions about his schemes - questions that aren't insults in disguise, at least - making this one more of a stumper than a welcome guest.

"Because, Shego," Drakken begins, "Martin Smarty seemed the gentlemanly sort, and I knew he wouldn't be able to resist helping a lovely young lady find her way out of the - err - corporate wilderness of his headquarters."

"Uh-huh," Shego says. "And why the dress?"

Drakken blinks. "So he wouldn't recognize you. It was part of the _disguise_. The same manner as the wig."

Shego's eyes narrow, like scissor blades snapping shut. "It had nothing to do with him looking at my legs?"

Drakken immediately rockets his gaze as far away from Shego's legs as it can go without flopping him over backward. It seems the only courteous - and self-preserving - thing to do."Why? What's so special about your legs?" he says.

Shego gets a curious expression, as though she can't decide whether to hug him or slug him. It disappears bit by bit as she bites her next question - a question that, by all accounts, she should already know the answer to. "Where'd you _get_ the dress?"

"Your closet."

"Oh-ho-ho. So now you poke around in my closet, too? How often do you go in there, anyway?" Shego's glare comes closer, digs in deeper.

This must be how the victims of the Spanish Inquisition felt. "Never often!" Drakken says. "I only went because - well, because I needed a dress for you to wear, and the best place to find a dress for someone to wear tends to be in her closet." He pauses, considers what he's saying. "Or _his_ closet, I guess, but that trend hasn't really cycled back aro -"

"Should stop talking now, Doc." Shego has retrieved her nail file at some point, and it punctures the space between them.

Drakken takes a subconscious step backward, his usually iron will bending in the face of her. . . face, which is hard as the diamond he needed to launch Operation Catastrophic Doom two years ago, hard enough to cut absolutely anything, even scratch _his_ surface. Everything on her is flaring, mad, and he doesn't know why. Can't produce an antidote without a diagnosis. Even a fake doctor knows that.

"Why is this. . . such a big deal, anyway?" Drakken says.

"A big deal." Shego slams one hand onto the back of his Thinking Chair, missing his head by an uncomfortably small distance. "Let's just say that the last time a guy put me in a costume and told me it was part of his plan, it didn't end well for either of us."

She is speaking the way the cardsharps at the Bermuda Triangle club deal - slowly, painfully, one card at a time. Drakken glances at the hand he's been dealt, and there are a lot of big, important cards, yet none of them match. He looks back at her and offers a shrug that pinches his ego.

"And it was a guy with the same last name, too," Shego continues. Her eyebrows fly up significantly.

For a moment, Drakken is sure _he_ is made of cards - that is how fast and how easy he crumbles. Except a house of cards wouldn't have nausea pulsing inside it.

Eddy.

Drakken must have shoved that one particularly deep into a dark mind-closet and slammed the door on it. But now - the images are already stitching back together in front of him. The earrings wide enough to punch a fist through. The shirt where you could nearly see her navel _from the top_. The pants that looked more like they'd been tattooed on than stepped into.

His wrists smart from where they were forced together behind his back, crouching him into a Quasimodo pose that he loves when he's pacing and ranting. But that wasn't a pose of cunning; it was meant to be one of - what did Jafar call it? - abject humiliation. Something else hurts inside him too, everything and nothing at all, the vaguely-registering sense of having lost electrolytes and not knowing where to go to get more, so you wander weak and confused.

How could Shego accuse her loyal-if-conniving employer of such a thing? After all they've been through together, she won't offer him the benefit of the doubt? He gets compared to a lout like his _cousin_?

The hairs on Drakken's nape turn to tiny swords."I'm _not_ like Eddy!"

"Uh-huh," Shego says again.

Distrust. She reeks of it. Like aftershave and deodorant and secondhand smoke.

"I'm _not_!" Drakken hates his own voice in the moment, trembling on the divide between treble and bass clefs. "I'm not a chauvinist! Women can do anything men can do. . . ." Drakken pauses to fact-check his latest blurt. "Except pee standing up," he adds in the interest of science.

"Did you seriously just say that to me?" Shego says, the curl of her lip echoing her.

Ah, a question mark! It leaves him room to lie.

". . . No?" Drakken ventures.

A choppy sort of laugh comes out of Shego. It, too, tests positive for disdain, and Drakken suddenly wishes it were directed toward his latest evil scheme, or his fashion sense, or anything other than _this_.

"Look, Shego, from the bottom of my heart," Drakken says, the bottom of his heart catching a little in his throat, "I never intended to -"

"You were wrong to do it," Shego says. Toneless except for a bristle.

She's as good as accusing him of a branch of evil that has never appealed to him. Didn't even interest him when he was a teenager - at least, not in the way it interested Eddy. How does Shego not _know_ that about him?

Drakken feels as if a thumbtack has collided with his chest. "I wouldn't go _that_ far!" he says.

"'Course not." The narrow eyes roll. "Because you're allergic to criticism."

"I am _not_!" Drakken says.

Except maybe he is. The strawberry marks on his cheeks are proof positive, or at least could provide probable cause in the hands of a good lawyer. Yes, maybe he does have an allergy to criticism, and he wishes it came with an EpiPen so he could poke. . . everyone else.

"Then you can admit you're wrong," Shego says, oh so sweetly and innocently. A threat simmers beneath her skin.

And to think when she made the flippant reference to Li'l Diablo earlier, Drakken believed that was as painful as it would get.

Drakken gives her the dirtiest, most ferocious look his facial muscles can concoct and clears a tickle away before he speaks. "I. . . was. . . wrong."

For the love of nanotechnology, how does anyone say that without anesthetizing themselves first? It's torture, pure and simple.

"Come again, Doc?" Shego says. Her twitchy mouth tells him she heard him just fine, but he knows he won't get away with it.

"Iwaswrong!" He thought it would hurt less, doing it more quickly.

He was wrong about that, too.

Drakken peers at Shego. The length of her arms lie furled at her sides in their usual lethal-ballerina pose, as graceful as his are gawky. He doesn't know what he sees in her that is so different from what other men see, but he should have remembered that he can't trust their voracious, predatory eyes with the sight of her. He should have, and that's a regret _almost_ as big as not sewing the master remote to his glove or wiring it directly into his own body so that it couldn't get lost.

(Probably the first one. He didn't have surgical tools, or a desire to operate on himself.)

"Shego. . . I'm sorry," Drakken mumbles.

The words stick in his craw, but they're better than "I was wrong." And he _is_ sorry, so sorry he wants to hug her - just unstiffen his arms from his sides and slide them around her, only he might have better luck embracing an ironing board. Or the steaming iron.

"I didn't meant to objectify you. That's the _last_ thing I'd want to do. . . well, that and stick metal tongs in the toaster. That's hazardous to your lifespan." Drakken waits a beat, tilts his head. "But then, so is ticking you off."

The ghost of a smile appears on her pointy greenness. "You're a prince, Dr. D."

Drakken rubs his fingernails against his lab coat. "I prefer to think of myself as the 'Supreme Potentate' type."

A groan follows, and she can even make _it_ ring with sass.

Drakken touches the back of his wrist, still tender where the cuffs chomped in, and takes another look around the lair, seeing the couch and the lab table and the television. The complete and utter lack of bars and eternal white-flame lights. He was cuffed earlier this afternoon. . . and now he's home. _Somebody_ finally reread her contract.

"By the way," Drakken says, waving a hand around so as to make the remark seem casual, of no real importance, "thank you for springing me from prison. This time."

Shego turns her nail file to her fingertips. "No problemo," she says, and if there's anything under it, it's submerged deep enough that even Jacques Cousteau would have a hard time finding it.

Drakken sighs from the depths of his relief and throws all the rest of the day's events into a dark mind-closet. Locks it behind him.

Fortifies the lock with a chair under the doorknob.


	50. Clean Slate

_50\. When the train you are on is set to explode, grab your doom weapon of choice and GET OFF IT! There will be other chances, other trains as long as_ you _are still around to attack them!_

The inside of Drakken's eyelids is black. Plain black.

The color so striking on evil-lair decor strikes _him_ in a different manner - in the spirit, a bolt of discouragement. Normally, when he closes his eyes, it's the cue for the details of his plan to come frolicking in the space provided for them, resetting the scenario of his victory again and again and again. Even if he's in between schemes, he still has room to salivate over his end goal: the opulence of his palace, the submission of the crowds, the velor lining of his world-conqueror cape.

Now, no matter how many times Drakken clicks the mental file and begs it to open, there is only one distant still of a throne that appears more brassy than golden. A few algebra equations float, limp and unsolved, on either side of it.

Drakken groans and lets his head loll to the side, wincing at the blood pounding within, doing a fair imitation of a thundering herd of cattle - or of Silly-Hatted Scientists who had the gall not to invite him to their Brilliant Minds Convention. Today and yesterday, he has been immersed in pain. Everything is pain. Stand up, pain. Roll over, pain. Try to flick his eyebrow, pain.

Nevertheless, remaining still is not an option. Not after he has finally gotten a good night of sleep - well, a long night of sleep, sleep filled with red oceans and cloudy onyx masses that part enough to leer their fangs at him.

Let's see. That was last night, which means it was two - or has it been three? - days since Drakken's ingenious plan to slip mind-control serum into soldiers' sandwiches was sadly defeated. When he cranes his neck, which feels as hard and brittle as a piece of kindling, Drakken can make out the shredded remains of a notecard on the floor, the telltale green singe at its edges leaving no doubt as to how it met its demise. The train didn't even blow up after all, or so he assumes. A train exploding and taking everyone's favorite teenaged busybody with it would certainly have made national news.

The redheaded little nuisance - shouldn't she be studying for final exams or something? - will live to fight another day.

Drat.

Instantly, Drakken thrashes, feels salt water pouring in through all of his orifices, sliding down into his depths, tying itself together into a bundle, a bundle that threatens to pull him down to the ocean floor and keep him there among the giant squid and the anglerfish. It's the same feeling he's gotten, ever since the Disappeared Day, when he pictures destroying Kim Possible - completely different from what he always used to experience, which was the pure formula of triumph. Well, okay, maybe it was shot through with a _pinch_ of hoping it wouldn't be too horrific to witness, but certainly not enough to taint the formula.

Where was he anyway? _Kim Possible. . . the Disappeared Day. . . the train. . ._

Ah, yes! The train. The train whose roof he skittered across, trying to find the proper boxcar before the whole line of them was obliterated. The train whose soot he tried not to breathe in as Kim Possible aimed her strong-legged kicks his direction. And then a deep, dark circle took shape behind her, like a well turned on its side, and only when Kim Possible ducked did Drakken realize what it was, and by then there was nothing his sluggish-with-cold instincts could do.

He doesn't remember feeling his brain glance off the walls of his skull.

Too bad, because it certainly would have been a unique and scientifically insightful sensation to remember. Surely much more so than this stupid, commonplace _pain_ that Drakken already knows so well he could write its biography.

Everything becomes a drooly blur after that. Shego was there, all of a sudden, saying something - probably something unkind, because he remembers a gray curtain of sadness draping down after her words. Blindly, he staggered toward the hovercraft, the ground warping at interesting angles - toward him, then away - as he struggled to keep from losing the few bites of dinner his excitement let him eat. Resting his forehead against the dashboard, oh so lovely to just let himself fall forward.

Next thing he knew, everything around him was sterile. Poking. Prodding. The fizzy, almost ticklish smell that he recognizes from the little pastel bath balls that Shego keeps in her bathroom. (He doesn't go poking around in there that often, especially not since the Dress Incident, but one of the henchmen just wouldn't get out of the shower, and it was a Code Red _emergency_!) Shego's hands, steady as tiny tanks on his shoulders. People in stark white lab coats that made his own cobalt shade look even muddier and sootier than it was, moving around him.

No, "moving" is not the right word. He never saw them move. Just wink out of existence and pop up somewhere entirely different, like those little plastic targets at the carnival you're supposed to spray with water right as you finally got a good aim lined up. They always came popping up right when he was finally settling into sleep, too.

Ordinarily, sleep does not appeal to Drakken the way it does to other mere mortals. If he doesn't have a specific scheme in the works, he'll snuggle into his PJs once Shego has left for the evening, sometimes even enjoys burrowing under the covers, but only because it's comfortable. Sleep is a waste of time that could be better spent strengthening one's plans and perfecting one's weapons. And it's a big bully beside, sneaking up on you every couple of days and abducting you, forcing you into its world full of brilliant plans that would be forgotten as soon as you awoke and laser-breathing monsters that _wouldn't_.

That night, though, was different. His face weighed a thousand metric tons, tipping the rest of him forward, and he couldn't hold himself back. For once in his life, he _wanted_ to sleep, and instead he was wrestled awake and interrogated on what his name was, where he lived, who was the president of the United States, what year it was.

The medical reason would be immediately obviously to anyone who hadn't taken a blow to the cerebellum, but then, if Drakken belonged to that category of people, he wouldn't have been in the hospital to begin with, now would he? He was released with instructions to_ rest quietly_ for a while. No reading. No notecards. No surfing the 'Net. And certainly no hunching over a lab desk, working the kinks out of a new evil scheme. The doctor specifically said not to let him _focus_ on any one thing too much for the next couple of days.

"That shouldn't be too difficult," Shego quipped, obviously forgetting how intently Drakken can focus when he's stuck on an idea.

Correction. How intently he _could_ focus. For the past several weeks, ever since the Disappeared Day, his thoughts have been little live anchovies, so quick he could barely catch them, and too slippery to hold onto for long if he _did_ manage to. Shego's thoughts, he's sure, have always been dead sardines, neatly stacked and balanced within the orderly arrangement of her brain.

It's as though he's having a midlife crisis, only his _mind_ is what's receding, and he's always been decidedly more vain about that than his hairline. The brainwashing serum was the first plot to make it past the blueprint stage in nearly a month, and even _that_ didn't cooperate as well as it should have. Letters that were so tidily printed inside Drakken's head came out twisted and scrawled and jumbled on the notecards, but by the time he was finished and capped his pen, he always knew what he had meant.

When he looked back on them hours and days later, they were barely decipherable. Drakken would snatch up handfuls of them in a blind panic and flip frantically through them, just like he used to do with his phonics flashcards, wondering how they reached out to every other kid in his class except him and terrified of forgetting one and being labeled the dunce he wasn't.

And then he _did_ forget one.

A notecard, that is. Rather vital one, too. One that said that the train was only supposed to _act_ like it was about to blow up. Not actually _do_ it.

That isn't even the scary part.

The scary part is how Shego threw open the train-car door and hurled herself out, and Drakken. . . didn't. . . follow her. He remembers feeling something inside him rupture, the fluid of fury spilling out in the form of hundreds of tiny cries of _No!_

_No!_ \- this was his first truly inspired scheme in forever, and he wasn't going to stand back and watch it get tossed into the mass grave where all his failed schemes rest.

_No!_ \- he refused to allow himself to be foiled by Kim Possible, let alone his own oversight.

_No!_ \- he wasn't going to give up.

_No!_ \- he wasn't going to run away.

_No!_ \- because there might not be another plan - ever! - if he let this one go.

And so he'd hauled himself out through a skylight, up onto the top, running as fast as his infuriated legs could carry him, searching for the car that held the soldiers' food shipment before the whole thing could blow sky-high. Never once did he consider that even if he succeeded in slipping the serum between slices of bread and ham, it would all be destroyed anyway in a matter of minutes.

Too scared. Too desperate. Too shaken by the failure of the notecards he thought he could trust.

In the most abysmally frightening moment of his life, Dr. Drakken begins to lose faith in his own brilliance.

_No!_ booms through him again, painfully of course, since he can't catch a break, with the force of a stick of dynamite shoved into his brain. _No, there are other schemes in there,_ he thinks, crunching his fingers in his hair. _No, I'm not done yet!_

All he has to do is get to the lab. Nearly everything in the universe can be predicted - and therefore, controlled - by the use of algorithms. All Drakken has to do is find the one that pertains to total global domination, plug in variables he knows better than his own contact prescription, and he's in business.

Even Albert Einstein never found that. Of course, he was too much of a goody-two-shoes to even consider searching for it, much less sharing it with the world. That will make Drakken's discovery of it a billion times more significant than it already would have been!

(_Smarter than Einstein_. Ahhh, now _there_'s a bolstering thought!)

Sitting up feels like raking a pitchfork along his muscles. Hot, fresh waves of pain course over Drakken's face, dragging sweat - at least he _hopes_ it's sweat - behind them. Fortunately, the intensity of it closes his throat before he can make a sound. Gritting his teeth to bear it, Drakken scoots from the middle couch cushion to the bottom one, and the silky cloth of his pajama bottoms _squick_s across the cushions.

Just the smallest of _squick_s, almost inaudible even to Drakken himself, yet in an instant Shego plants herself at the foot of the couch. Her feet barely seem to touch the thin layer of plaster that's been clinging to every shark-tank crack in the floor since the henchmen rebuilt the place. _Curse_ her and her superhuman hearing and her superhuman strength and the gibes he can see resting so easily on her twitchy lips!

"And _where_ are you going, Sunshine?" Shego smiles at him, and the threat is unmistakable.

Drakken's own grin automatically flashes to life, shielding him from the wrath she could pull out any second. "Oh. . . nowhere."

"Darn right you're not." Shego drops onto the end of the couch and creeps her hand across the distance between them. It tells him, as clearly as any police blockade ever has, that he shall not pass. "Definitely not to the lab to bake up another one of your 'plans.'"

Her fingers form mocking quotes around the word, as if his plans don't even deserve the title. It aches in his head, right next to whatever's left of the concussion.

"Now, Shego," Drakken says, still holding the grin in place, "I'm sure you're aware that the doctors have underestimated my capacity for healing. . ."

"Hey, I bet you could get_ run over_ by a train and just get squished and pop back up like some cartoon character, but I'm gonna trust the guys with the medical licenses over Dr. Disaster Incarnate."

She's looking at him in that _way_ again, as though he's a madman. Not a world-conquering madman, either. A kissing-pigeons-down-in-the-park madman. The very title that Drakken has always embraced begins to itch and peel at him like those fake tattoos he licked on in prison.

"But - but -"

"No 'buts,' except yours staying on this couch," Shego says, and Drakken blushes, because did she have to say _that_ out _loud_? The glimmer in her eyes is almost playful, though that does nothing for Drakken's mood. "Seriously, give yourself more than six seconds to get better, okay? You're not Wolverine or somebody."

_Or me._ She wants to say it, Drakken can sense, but she leaves it hovering awkwardly above them. She must see that his frustration is growing, must know it is directly linked to his stubbornness.

Drakken growls at her but slinks his way back to the arm of the couch, as far from her as he can get, and folds his hands up so he can prop his cheeks on them. The equations of his life still flash in strobe lights behind his eyelids, but they're accompanied by an uncertainty entirely new. What if, after decades and decades spent trying to solve them, complicating and simplifying and working to keep both sides equal, they finally reduce down to something such as "five equals negative two"?

Unsolvable. False.

The thought is so disquieting that Drakken's entire body begins to quake against the sofa in loud thumps. He tells it to stop - _commands_ it to stop - but, like everything else in the world right now, it is apparently outside of his jurisdiction. The power he craves has eluded him once again.

And he's weary of it.


	51. Larry's Birthday

_51\. Learn to take pleasure in the small things. . . . My, how un-villainous does that sound?_

Getting the floors waxed was the best decision Drakken's made in a long time. Freed of dust and plaster and debris, its original rich hue has been restored, just a grape-juice-spill or two short of what they call _burgundy_. (_Ooh_, grape juice sounds good - he must make sure to buy some on his next grocery run!) The shark tank lines reach their full menace potential once more, gleaming in their slight, subtle indentations.

Most importantly of all, the entire surface is reflective again. Drakken likes bending down and examining himself, watching his reflection's face shift to mimic his own. He enjoys how the scar crawls down his cheekbone, how his thick eyebrow rises and falls like a windshield wiper, how his hair springs jauntily away from what Mother always called his "widow's peak," which sounds closer to a gloomy piece of architecture than a facial feature. (_Springs_ away, not _curls_ away. Curls are young and innocent and never to be taken seriously.)

It is a nice face, Drakken decides, if somewhat unconventional, one with the capacity to be ghastly when he glowers or kindly if he smiles. Right now his mood dangles somewhere in between.

Professor Dementor has been busted, which is certainly cause for some grinning - grinning widely enough that Drakken could see his reflection's tonsils if they hadn't been taken out in third grade. Good riddance. Dementor has been hogging Kim Possible lately, as though _he_ was elevated into the role of her arch-nemesis while Drakken was "doing hard time," as scary criminals like himself say. Strange thought. While Drakken knows, rationally, that it could be useful for a villain to slip under the radar, it chafes him like a blister, going without attention. Besides, he slipped under the radar exactly once before - that wonderful, terrible night - and he isn't eager to recreate that experiment anytime soon.

It was someone named Cousin Larry who took Dementor down. Drakken's never heard of him, though he presumes from the title that he's some relative of Kim Possible's. He thought he'd _met_ the entire Possible clan. The thought that there's a member of the extended family that Drakken was never introduced to feels strangely similar to all those occasions where the world's greatest minds held a convention and forgot to include him.

That's not the only thing keeping Drakken's chest from inflating as far it should. There's also the enormous, rotten matter of how he can't think up a villainous idea no matter how thoroughly - and frantically - he scrounges through his brain. He might as well be trying to eat ideas with chopsticks - tapping around on the plate in vain, the repeated failures impatient and nauseous in his gullet, finally wedging one, swinging it upward to pop in and chew. . . only to have it squirt from between the sticks and warp into another dimension, never to be seen again.

This isn't the kind of madness evil geniuses pride themselves on.

Drakken doesn't dare glance down at his reflection now. He already knows what he'd see: fatigue drooping his eyelids down to meet the black pouches beneath them, a forehead pinstriped with worry, how much deeper his lab coat's padding has to burrow to find some muscle to enhance.

"So!" Drakken says, perhaps a touch too loudly even for him. "What was Dementor's plan _this_ time?" He needs to hear how stupid it was, so he and Shego can laugh at it together. They haven't laughed together in. . . in. . . in a time too long and depressing to measure, so he simply leaves it at a long and depressing time.

Shego delivers her answer casually, with a side dish of caustic snap. "I guess he was trying to steal Kimmie's battle suit."

The battle suit, Drakken remembers all too well, defeated Shego but couldn't defeat Warmonga, both of which probably account for the bitter pull to Shego's mouth. As well as the bad taste rising in the back of his.

"Oh, that old thing." Drakken waves dismissively - well, as dismissively as he can with his wrist all a-tremble. "I didn't even remember she still had it."

Shego snorts like a thoroughbred horse. "You wouldn't, Fashion Novice. You can barely remember your _own_ clothes."

As soon as she's not looking, Drakken takes a rapid glance down at himself to ensure he is, in fact, fully clothed. Something about those words of hers can so convincingly strip him bare that it seems a distinct possibility that he might not be.

"As if Dementor's duds are anything to brag about," Drakken retorts, and that much is true (with a touch of teen slang, to boot). The guy looks preposterously like the German flag on a small scale. That shielding helmet _is_ certainly enviable, a look that Drakken can't copy, and not just on principle - the thought of metal surrounding his head panics the breath straight out of him. "Besides, I have much bigger matters to concern myself with!"

Such as how terrible it is to watch his mind become a wasteland. Forget elaborate plots on par with Operation Catastrophic Doom - he can barely rub two brainwaves together. Right now he would settle for the slimmest sprig of a plan, a shadow of a scheme, just enough to let Drakken know the sun is shining somewhere inside him. And to let him know the needle of his Villain-Meter isn't sagging toward E. He's still mean, but it's in the sense that he screams at the henchmen when they break a glass or mutters insults whenever he receives a brochure for HenchCo offering to help him end his slump - for a fee, of course. (And how do they know he's in a slump anyway?) Cruelty once came readily to the man who ordered Kim Possible's mind-controlled grandmother to finish her off or painstakingly designed a Synthodrone handsome enough to unravel the most level-headed teen girl. But no longer.

Still, it's not as if he's never had slumps before. For the first two weeks after he turned blue, he had _no_ world-domination schemes to speak of - too busy adjusting to his new shade. And head colds always lay him low for at least five or six days, depending on how high a fever he's running.

Drakken's ego roars, loud and dangerous as a starving lion. He can almost feel it churning beneath his skin. Another memory takes shape. Hank Perkins, giving him a crash course in economics while they ran the cupcake store together. Specifically, his lecture on recessions versus depressions.

Recessions are fairly normal - unpleasant but brief, needing to be ridden out, the fiscal stomach flu. Depressions, though, those are less common and always worse somehow. Maybe they last longer or spread wider or are resistant to the usual treatments.

Drakken's had recessions before. But this - this is a depression. A depression of things he always took for granted, things he would auction off his soul on eBay to get back. Assuming, of course, that he still has a soul to sell.

_Not A Through Sreet!_

_Warning! Road Closed!_

_DANGER! DANGER!_

The same old signs block him from going down that road, and for once Drakken heeds them. In this depression of deviousness, he cannot afford to doubt himself.

Heh - _afford_. That's some pretty good wordplay, especially considering he didn't plan it. Drakken can feel one side of his lips tipping up, almost of their own volition.

"It looks like Dementor's finally gone nutsoid over that battle suit. He's been obsessing over it for, like, six months now. At least that's what it says here. Could explain why we haven't heard much from him lately." Shego's voice is a rope tossed down into the pit Drakken didn't even realized he stumbled into, and he clutches it for dear life.

"Ah, yes," Drakken says. "Come to think of it, he _hasn't_ harrassed me any since before prison." His own voice has a little difficulty with that last word - not a shake, just a warning creak, as if the very foundation is in danger of crumbling. He folds his arms and knocks them, hard, against his front to repress any further unstable sounds. "I guess he's too afraid of me now."

Shego lets out a guffaw - without spraying spittle or anything. (What exactly did that rainbow comet do to her and how can he maximize his chances of being struck by one?) "Uh, big no on that one, Dr. D. When has Dementor ever been scared of _you_?"

It stings, it burns, and he's surprised his knees didn't give way, but Drakken refuses to be scandalized by her disrespect this time. He needs to turn the element of surprise back around on her, and what better way to surprise her than by agreeing?

"Since never," Drakken says. "But that was before the night - well, you know. The night we don't speak of." The chambers of his heart are torn, two of them wanting to puff out, two wanting to shrivel. He slathers over it as fast he can. "And that was very intimidating, especially when combined with Dr. Drakken's new leaner, meaner packaging!"

"Oh, is that what you're calling it?" Shego asks him between suspicious hints of mockery's twitches.

"Ye-es!" Drakken says. He moves one ominous stride closer to her. "What would _you_ call it?"

The twitches multiply. There's an epidemic of them now. "More like 'post-prison malnourishment.' Seriously, did they not _feed_ you in there?"

Drakken can't tell whether it's disapproval or concern he's hearing, and at this point it makes no blasted difference anyway. With every word, no matter how it was meant, he feels his frame growing ricketier. He suspects he's only one more good jab away from becoming an old wicker rocking chair with plump cushions for cheeks.

One of Drakken's hands bunches into a fist and waves in the air, as much of a reflex as a sneeze. "NGGGH! Shego, one of these days. . ."

It goes unfinished, of course. His Fuel Cell of Threats is running on low batteries, too.

Drakken scuffs the heel of his boot across the floor, only it doesn't scuff. Instead, it caterwhauls an emergency-breaks screech that nearly severs his nerve endings. The glare Shego shoves his direction doesn't help.

Oh. Right. The waxed floor. The one he was so excited about ten minutes ago.

Drakken smiles at her in a quick, nervous flash. "Aren't you glad we decided to get the floors waxed, Shego?"

"Oh, yeah," Shego says. "This - what you see here? This is me barely containing my excitement."

She says it with her body slouched against the chair, boredom rising from her like steam from a boiling chemical brew, one best encountered from safely inside a biohazard suit. Does she _ever_ get joy out of anything that isn't directly related to someone else's suffering - most problematically, his? It saddens him. Angers him, too. He needs to fix it. "Don't you like the smell at least?" Drakken says.

Shego flips a page of the newspaper and flips her eyes, too, back into a roll of disgust. "Well, potpourri's not gonna be put out of a job anytime soon. Although" - she almost grins - "it does cover the stink coming from your lab, so there's that."

Under-eye skin bunching up. Harder to see around.

Ohhhhhhh, now she's fighting _dirty_.

"That 'stink,' as you so crudely refer to it," Drakken says, in the lofty fashion befitting the world's future overlord, "is actually ammonia extract, which is known for its powerful cleansing -"

"Ask me if I care."

Oh-ho-ho, no, as Shego herself would say. He's not falling for _that_ one! "I shall not, Shego," Drakken says, poking his nose upward, "for I already know what your answer will be."

Shego fires another hard-chinned look at him that he shouldn't-shouldn't-shouldn't flinch at, and he doesn't this time - not on the outside, at least. Jack Hench would demand to know what kind of villain is afraid of his own sidekick. Ha. Drakken would like to see Hench stand unwaveringly with sharp Shego cutting into him like that. Her jaw is a deadly instrument of precision. His is more like a rubber duckie.

No, he should not be thinking that way. Drakken shakes off the uncertainty and slips back into the objectives at hand, rejoicing over Dementor's troubles and daydreaming about the defeat of Kim Possible.

They fit the way his lab coat does these days: not uncomfortable, but far too saggy, ballooning out around his body's shrunken infrastructure.


	52. Graduation (1)

_52\. Don't tick off aliens. I'll say it again: Don't do_ anything _to tick off aliens!_

Warmonga's husband dismisses them with a wave of his hand.

That's _it_? No gloating? No monologue? Not even a single, bellowing word that could expand to fill the entire ship until there's no room for a wiseacre retort to squeeze in? _What a wasted opportunity!_ Drakken thinks.

Except it's effective. Very, _very_ effective. Very. The shacklejacketcuffs locked around Drakken's wrists and ankles press in tighter, chewing into his skin. He's not sure if the male Warmonga managed to constrict them with his gesture there, or if this has a more psychological explanation. When Drakken taps his cheek with his tongue - the closest thing to an appendage that he can still move - it comes back salty with sweat, and more of the same waterfalls down his back, sticking his lab coat to his skin. Strange, considering this spacecraft is one of the coldest places he's ever been, second only to the North Pole.

Somehow, the silence is more frightening any words could be, just as dark is scarier than light. That's even stranger since, from a scientific perspective, neither silence nor dark even truly exists; they merely represent the absence of things that _do_.

The platform Drakken and Kim Possible are suspended above gives a clicking noise and begins to float them both down the hall. Another hot wave rolls over Drakken, grinds his jaw, and crackles down his spine. He cranes backward for one last glimpse of Earth - his home, his would-be kingdom - the planet that rejected the greatest ruler it would have ever had, and is now paying for it. Shaken from its very foundations by giant, scolding, pea-green hands.

It is an uncharacteristically feeble attempt to wring any ounce of triumph from the situation. That expression about trying to wring bodily fluids from vegetables - however it goes - would apply here, because there is nothing good about this situation. Nothing.

And he sees that "nothing" beaming through the screens that aren't blocked by the big square heads.

Their giant spiders of machines with their nail-shaped legs puncturing concrete and asphalt. Houses collapsing as if they're made of playing cards. Glass spraying into the air as people shriek in three-hundred-part harmony.

How can they have succeeded where his Diablos failed?

A stench comes off the thought. Drakken finds himself twisting away from it and cringing in anticipation of the olfactory horror to come. It reminds him far too much of standing in the hallway outside the courtroom, awaiting his sentencing, soaking the armpits of the dress shirt he was persuaded to wear, listening to newscasters censure him, and knowing he was dirty on a level his lawyers could never clean up.

The shudder that travels through Drakken's framework _this_ time is long and heavy. He feels himself paling.

And he is sure he must be bleach-white as the floating platform drags him past Warmonga. Warmonga, who once pecked him on the cheek and offered him anything he needed to conquer the world, Warmonga who now refers to him as "Blue Deceiver" as if the name is a plague she's calling down on him. Her eyes are steady on his, firmly within their sockets, and yet they manage to lash out at him, tentacles stinging every spot they hit on his body. They must be Portuguese Man-of-War tentacles, Drakken decides somewhere in his consciousness, potentially lethal to every creature on the planet except Portuguese Man-of-War fish - and, oh, how Drakken wants to be a Portuguese Man-of-War fish at this point, even if they are tiny and purple-striped and goofy-looking. After all, he's already scarred and blue and built funky - does anyone even _say_ "funky" anymore?

The amount of information that Drakken cannot begin to process piles in a heap inside him. In theory, this should bar any more from getting in, but he still absorbs everything as he's towed past Warmonga's husband - what is his name again? War-something-else, too? Warmachine? Wargames? Warbreaker? _Whatever_.

In his last few seconds in the room, Drakken gets a glimpse of - of - _Mr. Warmonga_'s profile. The rusty-red markings like the arrows on elevator buttons peaking above and below each empty yellow eye. Sickle nose and a forehead like the business end of one of Killigan's golf clubs. His smile is really nothing but a tic at the corners of his mouth.

The shacklejacketcuffs are the only things keeping him upright, Drakken can tell. Every blood cell inside of him, red and white, jumps and jitters as if it's received a caffeine injection, but all the synapses seem to have detached from his brain. Mr. Warmonga isn't reacting like a man who has finally achieved his lifelong goal, a man who has trounced everyone who doubted him into the ground and made himself their overlord. To him, this is a video game level that he has played over and over again, and he is pleased - but not ecstatic - to have beaten it again.

_Now_ the cold registers, ambushing Drakken from all sides, sending his knees crashing like a pair of cymbals. Shego looks like the Good Witch Glenda next to these people.

_Shego._ Drakken's next breath trips over a lump. _I wonder if she'll miss me - I mean, I wonder if she'll be glad to see me when I get back!_

When Drakken blinks, the Diablos wait behind his eyelids, as they have for over a year now - first as objects of pride, then as reminders of disappointment, then as phantoms in his nightmares, and now as manifestations of. . . regret? Is that true? Can that possibly be true?

_No_. Drakken wrenches his head from side to side, intensifying the fiery throb. What he regrets is that he was abducted by aliens, even if they _did_ take Kim Possible, too, and now they're on their way to an extraterrestrial dungeon filled with fascinating instruments of torture that would glorious if he were to - gulp - observe them from the proper side.

Pulse in his otherwise-numb fingertips, Drakken throws a glance at Kim Possible. He expects to see something snooty - _Oh, great, my arch-foe will be the last person I talk to before I die_ \- something along those lines spilled across her face. But it isn't. She keeps a wary watch on their surroundings, her skinny little neck taut, and nowhere in that wariness does terror try to claw its way free.

Of course she isn't scared. Death is never on Kim Possible's radar screen, and ordinarily, it wouldn't be on Drakken's, either. Ordinarily, he believes he and his team will survive any storm (of the thunder-and-lightning variety or the trickier type that doesn't show on Doppler radar). After all, he is a genius and Shego, though she would likely score at _least_ ten points below him on an IQ test, has a certain knack for situations that can't be beaten back with chemical equations.

That was _before_ he saw the look in Warmonga's eyes right as the door shut and sealed behind them, tighter than a trash-receptacle in bear country. Drakken always thought of hatred as an overpowering burn, blistering through dermis and epidermis all the way down into your internal organs. This was closer to a neatly contained campfire, roasting a marshmallow of boredom.

_Boredom_.

Hatred and boredom are two of the emotions Drakken can recognize best, for they are the two that most often occupy Shego's eyes. But since one always jumped aside to make room for the other, Drakken figured they were mutually exclusive. You couldn't want someone to die with every fiber of your being while simultaneously not caring about them. . . can you?

The itchy irritants of Kim Possible's words from earlier come back to him: _YOU can't. Apparently, THEY can._

Didn't even pack it into an insult and hurl it at him. Dropped it at his feet, matter-of-fact, and then trotted off like a pet who didn't want to play anymore.

Remembering Warmonga's look prevents that particular annoyance from grabbing hold, though. It didn't yearn to leap across the ship's hull at him and throttle him. It was the way you would eyeball a sickly rooster - a rooster that bloodied your toe once - on its way to the chopping block.

In that instant, all Drakken can _see_ is the chopping block, and his own head resting on it - a head that contains untapped brilliance, a head that isn't exactly good-looking but has its perks, literal ones in the ponytail, a head that certainly deserves better than this, right? Right?

_Stop. Stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop._

Drakken wishes his hands were free so he could massage his scalp, scour the image from his mind. What he wouldn't give for some leftover Brainwashing Shampoo (and Cranium Rinse!) right now.

Then again, maybe not. Didn't that get him into this whole dark pit to start with?

Warmonga seeing the advertisement. Warmonga kissing him, even though she was married - which probably just provided Mr. Warmonga with one more reason to despise Drakken. Drakken telling what didn't _necessarily_ have to be a lie about his status as the Great Blue. Who else in the galaxy was greater and bluer than Dr. Drakken?

If only he weren't so blue and so great. If only he'd never met her - well, if only he'd met her for just long enough for her to break him out of prison, accept his sincere thanks, and disappear from his life forever. If only she hadn't offered him all those planetary-domination weapons and enticed him so. Why, she was practically _begging_ him to lie -

_Drakken! Stop!_

The fight unexpectedly evaporates from Drakken as he stands there, pulled straight by the shacklejacketcuffs and _still_ not the towering presence he's always striving to be. Instead, he feels limp and weak. That's not so odd in and of itself - "limp and weak" has been a frequent visitor ever since prison.

But this. . . this is different. This time, it's as if his entire body has been grabbed and tossed upside-down like a saltshaker, pumped and smacked until some almost-microscopic object that had been dropped inside him comes tumbling back out onto the plate. Something he never felt fall into him in the first place.

Something that broke every villain who couldn't break it first.

Drakken tries to shake his head again, only to discover it's grown heavier than that tool box he helped Eddy heist that one time. (And, _yes_, his extra hundred-and-fifty-five pounds of support were crucial to the job.) His brain has come disattached again.

Or - wait - disattached? Is that even a word? Is it the right word?

The thought cracks, in much the same fashion his voice cracked when he tried to offer Warmonga the tried-and-true Dr. Drakken charm, the type that can even soften up Shego on occasion. Maybe there are no right words anymore.

A grid of green lasers - _ooh_, how advanced! - parts to let the platform in. Drakken stares around at the dungeon, spacious and comfortable. Or, well - it _would_ be comfortable if they'd get these blasted shacklejacketcuffs off him and let him stretch his aching back. Instead, it loops around him, taunting him with its wideness.

Anger and despair tingle at the side of Drakken's neck. Anger, despair. . . and the return of the flower headband.

Maybe it'll be "in" someday, but for now it's exactly what he _doesn't_ need.


	53. Graduation (2)

**~All right, I think we are _all _overdue for a happy ending. Love you guys! :)~**

_53\. Just forget it. All of it. It isn't worth it._

The applause of the crowd rushes toward him in one big tidal wave.

No, a _tsunami_, Drakken corrects himself as he gives the ribbon adorning his neck a bewildered caress. _Tsunami_ would be the technical term for a wave of this magnitude.

Drakken gazes out at the auditorium packed with people. Through a watery blur, they all smear together - oil on canvas, like that abstract painting that hung in the break room at Hank's Gourmet Cupcakes' main outpost. Happy shapes and luminescent smiles are the only things he can identify.

Smiling because of him. _For_ him! _At_ him!

For a moment, Drakken eyeballs it, wary of stepping forward and reaching for it. After all, who's to say it's not some kind of hallucination, concocted by a psyche dehydrated and desperate for. . . approval (and maybe even love)? His ego has winked out, flown the coop, leaving him mild, meek, and undeserving - words Drakken hasn't applied to himself since the day Mother found out he was a supervillain and said she loved him anyway.

But when Drakken grasps at himself for confirmation, he locates the medal right away. You can't bring up a hand and fold it around a mirage, can't marvel at a mirage's heft and know it to be gold, atomic number seventy-nine. Even in dreams, the sense of touch is muted.

Which means - this is _real_.

(And only now can he freely realize that there were times he doubted it ever would be.)

The mosquito-bite feeling in Drakken's chest departs, its exit unceremonious but significant, as though it might not be dropping in on a regular basis anymore, as if he's been cleansed with one of those little homemade concoctions his mother used to treat rashes or bee stings. Even at his very youngest, he wanted to know how they worked, how they healed, not satisfied with his mother's hand-waving explanations of "mommy magic." His fascination with all things chemical truly has been lifelong.

By now, the masses have settled somewhat, though Drakken can still make out that oil-paint-shine on their faces. He could have put that there himself, could have mind-controlled them into shouting his name. But then he would have been the nature photographer who got the perfect picture of a butterfly only because it was already dead and pinned down into a transparent-topped box, instead of snapping a candid shot of it mid-flight among the wildflowers.

Speaking of flowers, the long one that initiated that. . . er, impromptu embrace between him and Shego now retreats to Drakken's side, faithful as a henchman and far more competent. Its power runs inside him, and Drakken accepts it, same as he has accepted that his skin will forever be blue and his left cheek shall always be lashed by a scar. Petals and vines will probably spring from his neck at inopportune times for the rest of his life, but they won him this medal, so how can he be mad at them?

No, for their great service, he'll have to buy them bucketfuls of their favorite fertilizer. . . or whatever it is they would want._ Sheesh. I'm really going to need to study up on raising plants!_

If he didn't know better, Drakken would swear the flower giggles, dangling there.

Beyond it, Drakken pauses to glance at Shego, who scarcely looks like herself in a subdued green dress. She watches him with mirthful eyes, eyes that don't have their usual mean glint even as she mouths "Softie" at him.

Drakken's eyebrow sees no reason to lower into its ferocious crouch. Of course the itch in his chest has gone away. There's no room for it in there anymore. This must be how the legendary Grinch felt when his heart grew three sizes in one day.

Physically - scientifically - his heart is the same four-chambered aortic pump it has always been, incapable of growing much bigger than his fist (which isn't very big). But on some other, less exact level, it feels swollen, its beat now substantial enough to stand on its own, no longer needing maniacal chortles to prop it up.

It feels - _free_.

Warmth comes to wrap him from every direction as Drakken glances back at his adoring audience. He leans in toward the microphone, which screeches static to all four corners of the room, and he doesn't even mind.

"Thank you." The words lunge out from the bottom of his heart. No, his gratitude isn't just coming from the place that no longer aches and itches, but from every single part of him, dandruff to toeprints, all two hundred and six of the bones in his body. "Thank you all very, very much!" he hollers.

The crowd roars its reply.

Drakken never wants it to end _ever_. Only when the curtain at the front of the stage begins to creep downward does Drakken inch his way backward off the stage, trying to keep his fans in sight as long as he can, straining against contacts that compromise his visual integrity by smudging everything together.

It doesn't matter, though. The space in his brain that related to him everything he'd need to do to beat Warmonga and Warhok - so clear he even remembered the big guy's name! - can still see, in a non-ocular way. And right now it sees life stretching out before him in an endless parade of commendations and ice-cream sundaes on Sundays (and Tuesdays, too) and flying kites down at the park - not even to measure wind resistance, just because it's _fun_!

Come to think of it, does Middleton even have a public park anymore? Drakken isn't sure. He hasn't exactly explored the town since dropping out of college. Oh, sure, he's come nosing around a few more than a few times over the years, but that was in the middle of plans when he was in Hyper-Focus and could wander down an open manhole without even noticing his shoes were getting wet. Not to be confused with its opposite, _Hypo_-Focused, where he could be undone by a quarter on the floor, because what was it doing on the stage of his soon-to-be-greatness?

Now - what was he thinking about?

Ugh. This is definitely what Shego derogatorily refers to as a "bunny trail." Which can only mean he's in Hypo-Focus right now.

Drakken has just clenched his attention back around _Is there a park in Middleton?_ when his left foot takes a step into empty air, followed closely by his right and then the rest of his body slams the floor. Both hands fly up to protect the medal even as every pain receptor in his body begins to chastise him with screams.

Shego reaches over and hauls him back upright. "Classy," she comments. "So when does the bragging start?"

The image of a park bench somehow serves as a "Road Closed" sign, blocking whatever retort he's dying to sling back at her.

"Dr. D?" Shego clicks her fingers in his face. He's not used to seeing them bare. Out of their glove-talons, they appear surprisingly small, belying their mightiness. "Where'd ya go?"

"I'm not sure." Drakken sighs at a register that he even can admit is dreamy. "But it's a good place. I'd like to go back soon."

Even Shego's signature _you are so weird_ snort sounds melodious to him - especially after those panicked, lonely moments in the deepest recess of the Lorwardian battle cruiser, thinking he would never hear her make fun of him again.

That night, back at his haunted-island lair - the one that suffered the least damage in the invasion - Drakken can hardly bear to take the medal off. He handles it with the care he usually reserves for samples of toxic substances, folds its cord, and tucks it gently into his sock drawer, nuzzling it in his favorite pair of blue polka-dotted socks. His "lucky" socks, a less-scientifically-inclined man might label them, and suddenly Drakken wants to research why people believe in luck.

Actually, he wants to research _everything_. He wants to research why naked mole rats are so much tougher than they look and when high-school football teams started recruiting buffoons and how arch-enemies can forgive.

Six different times between brushing his teeth, rinsing out his contacts, and changing into his pajamas, Drakken dashes back to the sock drawer and yanks it open to make sure the medal is still there, that this chapter in his story is still true. And it always is. At long last, exhaustion droops his eyes and strings tight across his temples, and Drakken skids between the sheets, which welcome him with a silky hug and a minimum of static electricity.

For the first time in a good long while - maybe the first time in his lifetime - Drakken's soul is content, the way your belly gets to feeling after a satisfying meal.

With a single, almost-graceful, sweep of his arm Drakken cuddles Sir Fuzzymuffin the Second close to him. His hand fumbles for the boxy gadget beside his pillow. Last week - gosh, was last week only a week ago? Seems as faraway as the dinosaurs - anyway, last week he wired his bedroom lights into a remote control so that he can now turn them off with just a push of a button. Of course, it was just a flip of the switch before, which isn't terribly more complicated, but could he do it without leaving his bed, _hmmm_?

(The answer is no, and therein lies the brilliance of it!)

Before he snaps the lights off, though, Drakken drifts his eyes to the center of the room and gives his rescued Hydro-Pollinator one more extended, loving look._ Don't tell any of the other inventions,_ he whispers to it in his mind. _But you'll always be my favorite._

After all, it ended up taking down _three_ supervillains.

Warhok. Warmonga. And Dr. Drakken.


End file.
